Finding sources for a project is really easy. Finding well-written and relevant sources that fit into your paper is a bit harder. Chapter 6 is all about evaluating and choosing the best sources. Very often, it is much harder to find a good source than it is to write the actual paper. There are three main source types that source can be: primary, secondary, and tertiary. A primary source is an original document, a secondary source is a document written about that original document, and a tertiary source is based on multiple secondary sources and has information about a topic. Primary sources are considered to be the best sources, since they are the original document, but they may be hard to find. Secondary sources are much more abundant. I have never really used any tertiary sources for anything, but I would imagine that they are still acceptable sources. It’s not that hard to find these different sources, but it is hard to figure out which one to use in a paper. It’s important to view the source critically and try to answer the questions, what is the overall rhetorical situation and what is the genre off the source? I used to go into a source with my viewpoint already determined and so I would just look for any part of the paper that agreed with me and cited that. This can work, but it’s much better to have a rough idea of what you want to write about and then learn from the sources you read. Otherwise, finding sources that will fit into your paper will be much harder than it has to be.
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