Today, i would like to share with everyone about sourcing material. The sourcing material is a second chapter in English for Academic Writing' course after plagiarism topic. So, i would like to start this discussion with its definition first. Do you ever think where you go when you need any information for your study? In my understanding the sourcing material is when you start by looking for information from different sources. Before you go to any sources, you need to understand the types of information first. Based on my reading on Writing With Sources book by Krishnakumari Karuthan who is my lecturer in this course. Actually information can be divided into three branch which are single-fact information, general information and in-depth information.
Firstly is a single-fact information that is a specific factual information that we cannot change or fabricating facts. For example who is the first Malaysian Prime Minister and his contributions. Next is the general information that offers an overall perspective on a particular topic. For example, you are given the topic "Structure of Cell Animal", you will need to look at several aspects of this topic such as function of cell, types of cell and others aspects. Lastly is in-depth information that gives a detailed account of a topic. For example, a journal article entitled "The Therapeutic Effects of the Asam Jawa Juice on Infected Throats" may describe detail about the sample, methodology, perception and others that you need to use online search engine to located this information.
How To Search Sourcing Material
Usually the students will gets the information from books and the internet. Now, i will tell you the easy way to search the information from other sources. Most of you are familiar with internet right? The internet is the source that we can use the information. Besides that we also can use books, newspaper and magazine, and theses and dissertations.
When you use internet as the source, make sure that information in internet is reliable and credible. You should avoid from use the information from people's blog and individual business websites. For example reliable sources that you can obtain from internet are e-journal, search engines, group discussion forums and online database journals.
In the e-journal, you can get in free online which are created by an individual or group of people that want to share the latest information in a specific field. In addition you also can sign in in your university library. You should identify e-journal titles that are related to the topic you interested in.
Next is search engines. I think we are very familiar with Google, Bling and Yahoo but do you familiar with Alta Vista, Dogpile and Google Scholar? In this source you must choose any one and click. You need to type the keyword into search engine and it will display many items that related to your keyword. As reminder you must make sure that "url" that you type is credible and reliable. For example the reliable "url" is .com, .my, .edu and so on.
Furthermore, you also can use the books as your source. For your information the largest source of information is academic books. In the books we can read the authors write and idea. Automatically, it will help us to develop our own ideas that relating the field that we study. Others than that, we can compare our idea with authors ideas.
In addition, in my class i had studied how to access in ezaccess.library.uitm.edu.my. I think you also can start to use it as the source to collect information. Many advantages that we can get when use this source.
Evaluating sources
When you evaluating the sources, you must make sure that is reliable and credible. In the easy way you should follow these eight questions (Winkler & McCuen-Metherell, 2008):
- Where was the information found?
- Who wrote it?
- Who publishes it?
- What are the writer's sources?
- What kind of tone does the writer use?
- What do the writer's contemporaries have to say?
- What is the writer's motive?
- What is the context of the writer's opinion?
In conclusion, good luck for everyone in search the material. I hope this can help you a lot in your study. All the best..
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