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"Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them."
There is a symbiotic relationship between reading and writing in that they are interconnected. One skill significantly helps improve the other. Reading provides content for our thoughts to emerge, and writing allows us to express our ideas about what we read. You will go back and forth between reading, researching, and writing when you are creating an academic argument.
IN CONTEXT
Reading Critically
Let’s say you come across a post on Instagram about the positive effects of new weight loss drugs, based on testimonials of a group of people who have used the drugs and lost 10–15% of their body weight. However, the content of the post does not include information about how there are also people who might gain weight while taking one of these new drugs. You know this because you have a friend and a co-worker who recently tried the medication and put on weight. In commenting on the post, you feel compelled to mention how the post is misleading in that it misinforms the public, leading them to believe that everyone who uses the drug will become thin, when in reality, there is evidence to prove the opposite. Had you not seen this post, you may not have had drawn this conclusion. Therefore, your writing (in the form of commenting on an Instagram post) results from reading critically and considering the topic from multiple perspectives. In doing so, you help other readers and commentators understand that the post favors one outcome in a biased manner.
In academic writing, as well as on the internet in general, we all need to be able to read sources critically. Here the word critical does not mean finding fault, like the more common meaning, but rather being analytical. While finding fault may be a part of any analysis, the main purpose is not even to say if the article you are reading is good or bad, but rather to determine if it supports or challenges your perspective, provides insight into your area of interest, or otherwise helps you toward your own goals.
Critical reading comes after reading for literal meaning, where you draw inferences and make associations. It is the process of analyzing a text by evaluating the author’s arguments, purpose, and underlying assumptions, considering the context in which it was written, and questioning the information presented to form your opinion. In doing so, your reading becomes more meaningful in that you become actively engaged with the source by asking questions and looking for evidence to support claims by the author.
In writing a paper for a college class, be sure you’ve read all the required texts and carefully read the assignment prompt before you gather preliminary information. It can be really helpful to talk things over with someone at this stage of the process and make sure you are properly grounded in the basics of your topic. This stage is sometimes called pre-research and is part of the planning stage.
Next, you will need to locate and compile sources to use in your research project. But where do you find sources that relate to your topic? And how do you choose which sources to use? This section will help you answer those questions, learn how to use research to narrow your interest to a research question, and then find a claim (or thesis) you will write about.
Ideally, your sources will both enhance and challenge your claim, allowing you to confront contradictory evidence and synthesize ideas, or combine ideas from various sources, to produce a well-constructed original argument. Let's look at some options.
The most important foundation as you begin is to keep in mind that the quality of your sources matters. They must be credible (that is, trustworthy), recent, and relevant to your research question. And in truth, you may not find even one such source on the first page of your results. However, there are simple ways to filter out the noise. In this tutorial, we will introduce how to find sources for your assignments. The abundance of materials online can make research easier, as you can find pretty much anything on the internet, from century-old books to journal articles published last week.
But the enormous amount of material can also make research difficult. If you search for any term, such as entering a research question into a search tool like Google, you will immediately get thousands of links to newspapers, blogs, and other sources like listicles (short articles formatted as a list) and AI-generated summaries. Finding the resources that will actually help you in this sea of information is a real challenge.
However, the general internet search can be quite valuable. It can help you find out what the key issues are, to narrow your topic and take a position. Moreover, many articles found in blogs, newspapers, and so forth will reference the journal articles or research that the author used and may even have links to these sources.
EXAMPLE
A newspaper story about recent discoveries in medicine will almost always name the researchers and the article that the reporter is describing, so you can track down that source instead of relying on the reporter's summary and interpretation, which may be exaggerated or sensationalized to attract readers.You will be able to use a lot of different types of sources for your research paper, but we do want you to get practice finding academic sources. What makes a source “academic”? To be published, academic works must pass through a rigorous process called peer review, in which scholars in the field evaluate it anonymously. It is the peer review process that largely defines what we mean by “academic” writing.
You can find peer-reviewed academic sources in library catalogs, in article databases, and through Google Scholar online. Sometimes these sources require a subscription to access them, but students often receive access through their school. You should never have to pay to access academic literature.
The best approach is to use academic research databases. You can find these on most library websites, but usually you will need to use a library card to access them. If you are enrolled at a college, even on a part-time basis, you should have (or be able to attain) a library card that gives access to these materials. Even if you are not currently enrolled anywhere, most public libraries provide similar tools, and getting a library card is usually free and easy to do, though you may have to go in person. For school libraries, you would need to be a student to have a login. State, county, or town libraries are accessible for people who live in those communities.
Once you have access to a library, you may not need to go in person. Libraries have digitized their archives, and research outlets have been making their articles available through these portals. Look for a search portal on the home page of your library website, or for a link that is labeled “databases” or “academic search” to find the portal.
These portals have a huge advantage over using Google or similar tools:
For academic research, you may find it useful to begin with a general Google search and then move to Google Scholar. Google Scholar provides a simple way to do a broad search for scholarly literature across a variety of disciplines and sources—articles, theses, books, et cetera. These are vetted for being credible and appropriate to use, so they should be fine for your paper if they are recent and relevant. If you have any doubts, you can track down the original source. The article should name the journal in which it was originally published and may link to that source.
Keep in mind that some articles or books might be listed behind a paywall on Google, but you might be able to access them for free through your library account.
Source: This tutorial has been adapted from Achieving the Dream’s English Composition 2 and English 101 E-Text: Writing for the Rhetorical Situation License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
Freire, P. (1985). Reading the World and Reading the Word: An Interview with Paulo Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41405241
