English 1302
Rhetoric, Research, and Representation

Guidelines for Research Worksheets

The difference between basic education and literacy and critical or higher education is that in early literacy, answers to questions are generally provided to you (through a textbook or other form of information) and in higher education, you learn to find answers for yourself and learn to document the variety of sources and tools you use to find those answers. This skill is not limited to academic work (though it is absolutely necessary in academic settings), but is also a fundamental part of being a professional, dealing with complicated finances and life decisions, and contributing to your community (through politics, meetings, community decisions, solving social challenges).

An essential component of this course is “research” skills, and you will be learning to employ those skills over the semester. You will complete four research worksheets that are designed to introduce you to research methods, evaluating and documenting sources, and finding useful resources to facilitate the research you will do for this class, for other classes as you advance in your major, in professional settings, and in life.

The research worksheets are major assignments. I expect you to take them seriously and to complete them with thorough, developed answers. Research is a time-consuming activity; be aware that doing these worksheets effectively will require you to spend a lot of time looking up sources, reading through materials, summarizing information, checking your facts, and documenting the sources accurately. Each question is worth points, and you will only get full points for correct, developed, fairly detailed answers that are written in your own words and that accurately cite the sources for your information.

The following guidelines apply to all questions on the four worksheets:

• This is a writing class; I expect all your answers to be in full sentences and full paragraphs. The answer to the question should be clear to any reader, even if they don’t have the question in front of them.
• In most cases, the question will require you to read more than just a section of the source you are using for the answer. For example, a question such as, “explain what are MLA guidelines for using sources,” will require you to have a complete overview of what MLA guidelines are, who decides on them, who uses them, what they cover, etc. It will not suffice for you to read an overview statement from a website in order to answer any of these questions adequately.
• You are learning to do research and document your sources. Therefore, I expect you to indicate where you found your information and list each source following MLA guidelines on every question.
• You are also learning to avoid plagiarism. Every answer must be in your own words. If you draw exact language from a source, you must quote and cite the source accurately (following MLA conventions).
• You are more than welcome to work with other students in your class on these worksheets, but you must write your own answer for every question. You may not simply come up with an answer together and copy word for word your answers on your individual worksheets. It must be clear to me that you did all the work for these worksheets.