Research Sources: Primary, Secondary, Scholarly

In writing research, we have three types of sources we look at: Primary, Secondary, and Scholarly.  Although our definitions are very close to the definitions you've used for Primary and Secondary sources in content research, we apply these terms a little bit differently because we are researching how writing is used rather than simply using writing to research a topic.

For Project 1, you'll follow these requirements for your sources (minimum 15 sources total):

1. Primary Sources (5 total): think of this as the type of writing you want to teach someone else how to do (e.g. Twitter posts, financial reports, resumes.)
2. Secondary Sources (5 total): sources that talk about the Primary Sources, but they come from everyday media (e.g. websites, newspapers, magazines.)
3. Scholarly Sources (5 total): These are thoroughly researched discussions of how knowledge words. (Typically, you'll get these through Milner or Google Scholar. Wikipedia citations are also a good place to learn about the scholars and keywords you can type into a Milner search.)

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Finding Scholarly Articles on Milner

Next week will largely focus on finding good sources for your Project 1 research.  One of the key components for the project is finding useful scholarly sources via Milner Library.  Here's a series of videos that use the example of Trayvon Martin and Twitter to provide tips for finding useful sources. Note that the videos also reveals some of the frustrations of research - not every search will bring up what you're looking for.  These videos are not required for the course, but hopefully the can be helpful as you start thinking about Project 1.

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