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Informative Essay

This guide is intended for students who are exploring a subject with the goal to explain it to others.

Use this guide to find sources for your research paper.

Getting Started!
Before you begin a research project, it can be useful to consider what research is, why we do it, and how it makes us feel.

Developing Your Topic will help you identify a general concept or idea that you want to learn more about and develop it into a focused research question.

Web Searching can be a good place to start learning about a topic. We all use the web every day because it is convenient and often meets our information needs but it's important to learn how to strategically and effectively use web sources to locate information relevant to your research topic. 

Library Searching can be a good place to deepen your understanding of your topic. One advantage of being a college student is that you have access to the resources in an academic library. When you need to do in-depth research, you'll often use peer-reviewed journal articles from scholarly or academic journals in your work. 

Citing Your Sources are how you indicate to your readers what sections in your paper are your ideas and what are the ideas of others. They are also the most effective way to give your reader access to the sources you used in your research and as such, a required part of writing a research paper.

The Research Tool Box gives you lots of tutorials to learn different research skills.

 

 

 

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