Chapter Two and Four

Chapter two is about exploring and narrowing your topic. This means going from a broad topic such as "Water Pollution" to something a little more specific such as "Effects of Water Pollution in the United States". You can narrow your topic like this because of the exploration, or general research, you can do with the broad topic. As Ch. 2 shows, by going through scholarly journals, the school library database, and other such sources, you can decide what is important to you about your topic.

This is important to this week's class because we are going to be looking through some sources for our topics as well as fine tune what it is we are going to really write about. By reading tis chapter we have pointers as well as a good place to start for research.

Chapter Four is all about how to read and evaluate your sources. It explains that you should read a source more than once and in more than one way. You should annotate the source, ask questions about what it is saying, look into who wrote it and who funded it, why they would want to write it, you should consider how strong the evidence is within the source, among others. All of these factors will help you determine whether or not the source is reliable or biased.

This is needed for this weeks class because as we work with our sources, we need to be able to determine whether or not the source should be used in our paper. This chapter gives us a thorough list of how to determine this.