Essay 1:

    After reading through the variety of resources available for assisting in writing a research paper, I think it can be fairly said that the process of writing a research paper is much less about the writing and paper itself and has more to do with the preliminary work that goes into it. Before the foundation can even be laid for your project, you must first decide upon a subject. When deciding upon a topic, you should ensure that there's enough material to support what you want to write about, that the sources are respectable, and that you can narrow or broaden it enough to fit within the scope of what you're researching. It's important to keep your mind open initially and consider a variety of subjects when you start out looking for information and try to decide on what you wish to pursue.

    Once you have your topic chosen and a base of keywords to start from, it's important to go out and perform the actual “leg work”, or research, that goes into the making of a well-written research paper. You should keep your mind open to all possible resources, including the library, internet, newspapers, magazines, and other places where you can find good, dependable information. If you have any difficulty in locating sources, or determining where a good place to start would be, the instructor and a librarian are usually your best sources to fall back on.

    Simply having and assimilating these information sources is not good enough, however. Before relying on any individual source, it should be weighed and considered, especially in regard to internet material. Can the source be trusted? Is it reliable? Are they an authoritative official on the subject matter? If your source does pass this test and you do choose to use it, it must be properly marked and credited, according to your instructor's specifications, in your bibliography.

    When bringing all these sources together and writing the paper, the important thing to remember is that they are there to assist you and to provide you with the background you need to write the paper. Copying anything verbatim is strictly forbidden and is a serious offense.

    Writing a research paper is certainly a long and tiring job, but as long as you heed the helpful tips, take the time to do the proper preliminary work, and use all the resources available to you, it can be a fairly simple process and even fairly rewarding, as it gives you an excuse to research something you likely wouldn't bother to on your own.

Essay 2:

    Out of the list of online sources provided, I chose to review and evaluate “Avalon Project”, “Internet Scout Project”, and “World Wide Web Virtual Library”.

    The first one I went to was “Avalon Project”, a repository of historic articles dating from the start of American history to recent news conferences held within the past few years.  I found this site to have the less going for it in terms of aesthetics, but was very easy to navigate, find the information you needed, and track down sources. The search feature was a little limiting in how and what it could look for, which leaves you to have to find much of what you want through manual link clicking and some educated guessing. However, as a resource of law history, the site is more than capable.

    “World Wide Web Virtual Library” is a large site full of information on a wide variety of topics. The lack of much in the way of design isn’t as distracting as on “Avalon Project” due to that it’s simply bare-bones and doesn’t feel cluttered. The search feature is nice, but also lacks the ability to fine tune your search to any advanced degree. This website is definitely a good springboard for those who don’t have all the details of their topic figured out yet and need some good, solid information for getting into what they want to write about.

    Unfortunately, the “Internet Scout Project” was a bit of a disappointment. While it has a very nice design and feels well made, decent navigation is definitely lacking here. It feels as if they expect you to have some background information on their website before you even arrive. They don’t offer many explanations on how the site operates or what it is that you can gain from the website. While these things aren’t much of a problem and you can figure them out on your own, I still felt there should be more information. It did have an advanced search engine, but the information you could sort through, while quite diverse, it felt to be more limited than the other sites reviewed.

Essay 3:

    For this exercise (on evaluating sources), I chose to evaluate VirtualSalt’s page on the reliability of internet research sources. The page is quite large and very informative, which can lead to a problem in its own right. I believe it could’ve benefited greatly from an index at the top of the page or located elsewhere that allowed you to see the headings of the information contained within and allow you to jump straight to it. Otherwise, the author assumes you will read the article from start to finish, or else you will scroll along until you simply stumble across what you wish to find. It might also help if it was broken up amongst multiple pages.

    Ignoring the small gripes, the page is very helpful and even follows the rules it set forth within itself (the author lists his credentials, etc). It hasn’t been updated in a very long time, but for an article like this, that’s not terribly necessary.

    Most of what this page covers is all common sense. It’s important to check all the facts before using a source, which should come as obvious to most people. However, they do provide good guidelines for checking this information and proper ways to evaluate what you’re reading. Among their helpful suggestions, they provide information on how to start off in the right direction, to find more reliable sources from the start, to avoid steering yourself down the wrong path and ultimately creating more work for yourself later when you have to evaluate all this information.  You can do this by first determining what kind of information you are looking for, and therefore what kind of information you don’t want or shouldn’t get mixed up with, and determining the reliability of the source before going too far in reading and acquiring information.

    Finally, another helpful tip they provide is in the form of a handy acronym to help keep the wary junior researcher on track. By following the four simple steps outlined in the acronym, it’s much easier to stay keep your wits about you and keep clear of pointless, or false, information.

Essay 4:

    Plagiarism, in any of its myriad of forms, is not only morally and often legally, wrong, but also undermines the writing process and entire point behind a traditional writing class. Unfortunately, plagiarism is a difficult, touchy, and multi-faceted issue. Rarely is it simply an open and shut case. While there will always be cases of a person being simply too lazy to do their own work, or too desperate to get a grade and unwilling to put in the time, often plagiarism can occur simply from being too quick, not noting your sources correctly in the beginning, and even from simple forgetfulness.

    One of the first and easiest steps in avoiding plagiarism, or even simply accusations of plagiarism, is to be sure to properly keep track of all the sources you used in the writing and compiling of your paper. Videos, news reports, magazines, books, and the likes should all be recorded when you start doing the initial research for your paper. After the paper is written, all of this information should be put together into your bibliography in whatever format the instructor requests, most often the MLA standard. By forgetting and/or not properly documenting your sources, you could run into two different problems. If you later use the information but don’t remember getting it from another source, this information could ultimately end up in your paper and would be considered plagiarism. Another possible issue that could arise is if you do knowingly use the information from a certain source and simply forget to credit them in your bibliography, this is still a form of plagiarism, for you took someone else’s work, used it, and the original author was not credited.

    An even more confusing addition to this problem is the prevalence of internet websites now offering to write a paper for you, for a certain fee. The argument is that since the paper is not published anywhere else and is ghost-written directly for you, it can’t be plagiarism. However, regardless of what these websites call it or whether you feel you’ll be caught or not, this still is a matter of academic integrity. Whenever you submit a paper, you are providing the assurance that this paper is your work and your work alone. Plagiarism and academic integrity are serious issues and should be treated as such.