Can you help me understand this English question?
Context:
Essay 1 focused on the idea that the first step in the information literacy process is to realize that what one finds on the internet is likely of dubious authority (that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, merely that there’s a better source for the material).
Often, then, students click the “scholarly sources” box in OneSeach and presume that whatever information that comes is fine. But often, it’s not. Scholarly studies are only as good as the work that goes into them, and often different studies on the same subject end up coming to different conclusions.
Assignment:
For Essay 2, find two scholarly articles looking at the same thing. If, you’d like to use the scholarly article from Essay 1 as one of these, feel free.
“Same thing” really means just that: they need to look at the same aspect of a topic (theoretically, trying to answer the same question). The two articles you read for last week, on diet soda, attempt to answer the same question–whether diet soda aids or harms one’s desire to lose weight. This is a good example of a pair of articles on the same topic.
Once you’ve got the two articles, your goal is to figure out which one is better (or, alternatively, how they differ). How, for example, did they reach the conclusions they reached?
In order to do this, consider the author’s background, the journal in which it was published, any statements/possible conflict of interest, and the study design (a lot of the details how to do this are in the upcoming weeks).
You might need to do some research for this (on the author, journal, or conflict of interest, but it won’t be the type of research paper you wrote in high school or will write for Essay 3 and 4).
Criteria and Details:
- MLA-format should generally be followed. (12-point font, 1-inch margins).
- 3-4 pages, double-spaced. I’m not a particular stickler for length, but short essays tend to be underdeveloped.
- All quotations should be cited appropriately, with quotation marks around the quoted passages and parenthetical citations after them.
- All paraphrases should be cited appropriately, with taglines introducing the author or source of the paraphrases and parenthetical citations after them.
