Building your Research Skills

An introduction to knowledge and skills to help you become a more able researcher.

Making Sense of your Research

                 

Finding resources is a good start, but you have to activate what you have found: evaluate resources effectively and organize them clearly if you want to complete a good research project. 

How good are my resources?

You can open to full text by clicking on the three upright dots below the image

Understanding Evidence

Evidence for Democracy, a Canadian group devoted to promoting evidence-based scholarship, has published three guides to understanding and using evidence. Click on images below for PDFs:
 

                    

Avoiding Bias

       Julia Galef - Why you think you're right ~ Even if you're wrong (TED Talk)

https://youtu.be/w4RLfVxTGH4

The Problem with Source Evaluation

Would you like a deeper dive into evaluating your resources? Here it is:

 

You can open to full text by clicking on the three upright dots below the image

Outlines for Compare and Contrast Papers

Research projects often involve debate between two or more views. Here are two ways to structure such a debate:

 

You can open to full text by clicking on the three upright dots below the image

 

Organizing Notes for Research

Whether you keep digital or print files as notes of what you have read, here is a solid method to connect your notes to your outline so that you can retrieve them as you write.

 

You can open to full text by clicking on the three upright dots below the image

 

Writing Research Papers

You can open to full text by clicking on the three upright dots below the image

Persuasion and Effective Communication in Academic Writing

You can open to full text by clicking on the three upright dots below the image

Plagiarism - How to Get it Out of your Life

Open to full text if needed

The Academic Phrasebank

http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/?CMP= 
The Academic Phrasebank offers excellent and very user-friendly advice on the best way to use sources and identify key phrases to write academic papers.