1. List the five steps you should take as you plan a writing project
1. Select an area of interest: You should be interested in your chosen topic because you be doing an exhaustive investigation about that, so it could be easier if you are genuinely interested in it. At this point you have to select, in general terms, in which area you want to work.
2. Delimitate your theme: When you have selected an area of study, you have to delimitate it to draft your final investigation theme. At this moment you will be considering specifics place, time and population you’ll be considering.
3. Study the bibliography about your theme: Before writing anything, you should read what’s already done about your specific topic, this will be helping you to discover in which way you can contribute to the investigation; in this part you will be building your theoretical framework, which later will be, in part, the justification of the investigation’s relevance.
4. Establish a hypothesis: At the moment you already read about the area and the specific theme of study you can ask yourself an investigation question that will derive in your hypotheses.
What is a <u>hypothesis?</u>: It is an affirmation you do about your investigation theme. In your project, you will work to accept or reject it in the conclusion part. Remember that all the investigation project revolves around this sentence.
5. Start writing: Once you have been reading and investigating your theme you can start drafting your final work delivery. It is normal to write, delete and make modifications many times. The final paper has to be coherent and easy to understand, so pay attention to grammar and redaction.
2. Where should you look first when considering a topic?
When you are trying to select a topic you should look for every information you can access. Doing this you can be able to do<u> two things:</u>
The first one is determinate if your topic is relevant and new or little addressed because if there are already many investigations works in the area it is possible that you won’t bring anything new.
The second one is to start building your theoretical framework, which includes the previous investigations that are already done related to your theme. Also, it will be part of your justifications because the relevance of your approximation is, in part, based on its novelty.
3. Where would you go to locate each of the following: resources on the Internet, library books, and magazine articles?
To locate your base texts you can go to many electronic and physical places as libraries, newspaper libraries, internet, and etcetera. Specifically:
To locate resources on the internet: Try to use google scholar because it only takes into account serious academic places. You can ask your institution for its electronic resources list because every school pays for specific resources to their students.
To locate library books: You could go to your scholar library or search for those public and private libraries that are near to your place.
To locate magazine articles: The newspaper libraries are really helpful in this kind of materials because they are specialized in keeping all the newspaper and magazines that have been published since many years ago. Try to locate one near to your home. You can also search on the internet because many of them are digitalizing their materials.
4. What three things should you consider when taking notes?
Taking notes is a crucial part of a research process; your notes have to have, at least, these three characteristics:
1. Relevant: only write what is useful to your theme, remember that it is an error to don’t delimitate a topic, so be careful to don’t add many information to your list.
2. Trustworthy: All the information you take into account have to come from serious and approved sites (here google scholar can be really helpful).
3. Organized: If you make a mistake and have all your notes messy it will be super difficult to you to translate them on paper, so you should add, at least, its origin, author and year of publication.
5. Describe the purpose of using the<em> CARS </em>test.
<em>CARS </em>test helps us to determine if a source is reliable or not. Using it you can add more credibility to your project. Cars means:
C: Credibility: Can you trust in that source?
A: Accuracy: The source that you selected is relevant to your theme?, is its information real?
R: Reasonableness: Is the information based on true and trustworthy sources? Has it objectivity?
S: Support: The information that the source gives you can be corroborated in other sites or by other authors?
Remember that <em>CARS</em> works as a checklist, so you can be evaluating your sources with relative ease.
6. If information is accurate, it can be described as follows
When information is accurate it is correct, exact, detailed, easily comprehensive, up to date and factual. This means that the information that you are presenting has to be ascertainable and make sense following your research purposes.
