As the quality of high school education in North America goes down and the price of university education goes up, first year students are under increasing pressure to write stellar term papers lest they fail and end up operating a pneumatic conveying system for a living. Some students resort to plagiarism or homework buying to stay afloat and end up expelled. Don't let that that be you. Instead, follow our step by step guide on researching your term paper.
Step 1: Like Your Topic
Choose a topic that is both relevant to the course and that you are actually interested in learning about. If you view researching your paper as self-inflicted torture, you're more likely to cut corners. So if you're interested in the architecture of Toronto townhouses, write about that. If you absolutely hate polar bears, do not write about polar bears. Once you've decided, sit down and brainstorm all the aspects of your topic that you would like to know about.
Step 2: The Internet
For the first stage of your research, you'll be doing nothing more than teaching yourself enough about the topic to be able to research it intelligently. For instance, if you know nothing about tankless water heaters, you will miss out on aspects of the topic when you get into serious research because you don't know that they're installed by plumbers or made out of aluminum, both of which can be keywords in your searches. At this stage, it is acceptable to use encyclopedias, or even wikipedia.
Step 3: The Library
Now that you've got an overview of the topic, it's time to buckle down and find real, academic sources you can cite in your paper. These include first hand accounts, non-fiction books, and articles in scholarly journals. For this stage in your SR ED, libraries, specifically university libraries, are your destination. NO non-scholarly web pages. Start by running a search for your topic in the e-catalogue, then note the section in which books on your topic are stored. Visit it. Scan the titles and indexes for relevant information.
Step 4: Read, Remember, Quote
Once you've found your material, read it, taking copious notes and recording helpful page numbers. Copy a few of the more illustrative passages to use as quotes but make your notes in your own words. That way your brain cells perform the function of strainers and you'll be able to assimilate the information and write your own take, preventing you from plagiarizing.
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