Sunday, February 12, 2012
Dreading Research
For some reason every time I am assigned a research paper I immediately dread doing the research. I love to write, string the research together, and prove my thesis but I hate actually doing the research. Reading Chapter 2 made me a little less apprehensive, as it helped me realize that I make doing research harder than it has to be. I tend to go for it before refining my topic and deciding exactly what I will be looking for. I also tend to start with broad internet searches that do not hep me narrow down my topic. So many internet sources are not reliable and it can be hard to tell which ones are. This time I am going to try to do things right and see if the research is still as painful as it usually is to me. I am going to sit down and write out my topic, decide what I know about the topic already and what I need to know through research, and then I am going to go to the library. For some reason I always want to avoid the library, even though I could most likely find all that I need in a day as opposed to grueling sifting through of websites that are mostly junk. The Chapter had some good advice for search engines, web directories, and deep web recommendations to use when doing internet research. Hopefully this time around the research will be the easiest part of my speech.
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Similar to you, I do not enjoy doing research. I recall being up to 4 in the morning in 4th grade with my mom working on a research paper. Main reason... I procrastinated hoping it would just go away. Probably one of the biggest reasons that I don't like doing research for research papers is because I have to keep track of where I get what information so that I can properly cite the sources. It seems to me that just to get one's work published should be credit enough. It almost seems like it would be a bit self-righteous to expect everyone to mention me when they acknowledged that they found my information to be useful. Oh well, it is what it is... off to doing research papers and giving proper credit.
ReplyDeleteI felt the same way about researching for my essays or speeches. I would stress out about how hard that I would think it was going to be, so I would always postpone my research. I also never know where to start. A lot of the information that the book provided helped me a lot, like several of the search engines that compiled other search engines, I had never even heard of any of those! I'll definitely be using them in my research for this next speech.
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