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The Investigative Essay

A Journey into Research and


Documentation

Hints
Chapter 21 and Chapter 22 are the primary
source of documentation information for this
essay.
I encourage you to refer to these chapters often.
If you have any questions at any point in the
writing of this essay, contact me.
If you have not read the Introduction to this
essay, you need to do so now.

Your Topic
Investigate an academic major, a career, or job you are
interested in.
Based on this information, generate a copy of your
transfer plan from the STARS Web Page (stars.troy.edu
)
Write an informative essay in which you reveal your
findings.
Blend together your own ideas about your topic, as
well as ideas from three secondary, or outside, sources.

See Topic Sheet document for complete details.

What kind of information should


you include in this essay?
Requirements for a college major or
training for the career.

Formal education
Practical training
Personal requirements
Where one can obtain the training

What kind of information should


you include in this essay?
Type of work the career involves
What does one do on the job?

Job opportunities
Number of openings in a particular
geographical area
Opportunities for growth in the United States
Opportunities for growth in other countries

What kind of information should


you include in this essay?
Salary
Starting pay?
Opportunity for advancement?

Interesting statistics about the career


Rewards/satisfactions of the career

How do I find this information?


You investigate or research outside
sources.
You are required to use three outside
sources.
You must access at least two of the
documents electronically.
You may consider a non-print
source too . . .

What is an example of a nonprint source?


An Interview
You could interview someone in the career
and use that persons comments in your
paper!
See pp. 410-412 for more information on
interviewing.

How do I get started?


Choose the career of interest
Log on to the STARS website (access at
www.jdcc.edu OR stars.troy.edu)
Develop a transfer guide for your chosen major
and a transfer institution of your choice
Save the transfer guide in an electronic document
so that you can e-mail this as an attachment. See
the Course Outline/Assignments document for
due date.

What is the next step?

Do some investigative research on your chosen career.


Suggestions:
Consult the Occupational Outlook Handbook in the college library or online (
www.bls.gov/oco )
Utilize the databases available on the Alabama Virtual Library
Access is available through the JDCC Web site.
Note that you must have an AVL Password and User Name for off-campus access.
You can get this at the library on the Atmore and Brewton Campuses, as well as any
public library.
Click here to find the JDCC Librarys Serials and Solutions Database.
Click here to find Statistical Sources links on the JDCC Library home page.
To locate other online sites, use www.ask.com .
Use other print sources available in the college library as needed.
Click here to access the Leigh Library Catalog, which allows you to check the library
holdings for the JDCC Library.
Note that this may or may not be operable off-campus.
If you have a question about a particular source, contact the library staff at . . .
library@jdcc.edu
251-368-7610 (Atmore)
251-809-1584 (Brewton)

Attention!
NOTE:
Sources that were published before 2002 are not
acceptable unless you are doing a
comparison/contrast of past data and present data.
Your information must be current!

What do I do after I find sources


that I like?

You must make notes on the publication information for your


sources.
Author
Title
Publication (Publishing company, date, page numbers, etc.)

This information must be included on the last page of your essay.


This page is called the Works Cited page.
This page provides a list of all outside sources cited in the essay. This
list is organized in alphabetical order.

See pp. 372-374 to see a sample Works Cited page.


Note that on p. 372, the printer of your textbook began the Works Cited
page on p. 10 of the paper. Technically, it should have begun on p. 11.

How do I know how to set up a


bibliographical entry for each of my sources?
See pp. 382-394 (Chapter 22).
This section of the textbook gives you a formula to use
for each type of outside source that you might encounter.
Take your information (I.e. author, title, publication) and
plug into the formula.
Pay special attention to the Online Sources section on
pp. 390-394.
For additional resources . . .
Consult the following Web address for a step-by-step guide on
setting up a bibliographical entry: www.citationmachine.net.
Remember to select MLA format.
Click here for a Citing Electronic Information Web site.

Helpful Hint
Dont panic if you cannot find all of the required
information (author, title, publication).
If any part is missing, just keeping inserting your
information into the formula where appropriate.
If there is not author, just slide the title over into the
authors slot in the formula.
If there is no publication date, just put n.d. in the
appropriate slot in the formula.

Helpful Hint
Dont forget to include the date of access
for your electronic sources.
This date is important as it indicates the
date on which you captured your
information.

Helpful Hint
Have you decided to use information from the
Occupational Outlook Handbook in your essay?
Are you having trouble determining how to cite
this source on your Works Cited page?
************************************
Go to citationmachine.net and go to Online
Encyclopedia (under non-print sources).

Moving On . . .

Lets talk about how to


organize your bibliography
notes . . .

How do I take these


bibliography notes?
Some people make bibliographical cards on 3 x 5
note cards.
They put their sample bibliographical entry on a card.
They organize the cards in alphabetical order.
They type their Works Cited page from the cards that
are in alphabetical order.
This method works well when you are having to
juggle many, many sources, such as you would with a
research paper.

How do I take these


bibliography notes?
Other people, especially those who like to type versus
handwrite their information like to go ahead and
create in a word processing document a bibliography
entry as it would appear on the Works Cited page.
Many create one entry per page.
They save the electronic copy of the source and the
bibliography entry page in a file or folder for easy access and
identification later.
If they have a photocopy of the source, they print the
bibliography entry and staple to the source for easy access
and identification later.

What form of bibliography notes


should I use?
You may do either method of organization.
Keep in mind that, because everything
must be submitted electronically, I would
recommend saving your entries as a
document that you can save on a disk.

After I have made my bibliography


notes, what is next?
You must begin taking notes on your
research.
Taking good notes on the information that you
have read will help you organize the
information that you want to include in your
essay.
Taking good notes will help you avoid
common documentation errors.

Why must I be so careful in


taking these notes?
You must accurately document information
obtained from your outside sources to
avoid plagiarism.
See Plagiarism Policy in the syllabus.
See p. 404-406 (Avoiding Plagiarism)
Click here to view Plagiarism: What It
is and How to Recognize and Avoid It

How do I get started taking my


notes?

Read your sources.


Underline or highlight information that you think is useful for your
essay.
Think about your outline.
What main points have you identified for your thesis?
Where has your brainstorming led you?
What ideas are you trying to bring out?
What ideas need help (I.e. Where do you need to use outside
sources to help you generate ideas?)
Make notes on the ideas that you think will fit nicely in your outline.
Make notes on the ideas that you like but are just not sure where they
will fit on the outline.

How do I take these notes?


Some textbooks recommend a notebook approach in which
you make your notes in the notes section of the notebook and
keep a running list of sources in the bibliography section of
the notebook.
Using this same method, you could list the source
information at the top of a page and then make notes on the
information that you found in that source.
Using either method, you could also make notes to yourself
about where the information could be included in the paper.
***********************************************
This works well for some people, but many of my students
find that using the note card system works much better,
especially if they need a hands on approach to learning . . .

What is the Note Card


system?
See pp. 348-354 for an overview.

You use 4 x 6 note cards.


You capture your information on these cards.
You are able to organize your note cards to fit the pattern of ideas in
your outline, based on the topics in the outline and the topics on the
cards.
Often, if you are not able to determine your main points after
researching, you can group together cards with the same topic and
evaluate the information to see what main ideas emerge.
Thus, the note cards help you develop your outline.
See p. 374 concerning the transfer of note card information to a
computer file.

What information must I put on


a note card?
You may put information from the source wordfor-word as you found it in the source.
This is called a DIRECT QUOTE card.
See the Direct Quote Note Card with Comments
document.
The comments will guide you on the other types of
information that each note card must have.

What information must I put on


a note card?
You may summarize information from the source.
You put the idea in your own words. Be careful that you
do not merely do this phrase-by-phrase, but that you
summarize the whole idea or concept of the information.

This is called a summary card.


See the Summary Note Card with Comments
document.
The comments will guide you on the other types of
information that each note card must have.

I have my notes . . .
Now what do I do?
Organize your note cards into piles based on the
topic, or slug, lines.
Identify the ideas or topics that these piles
represent.
Begin to identify main points.
Then, identify the sub-topics that can be included
under each main point.
Develop a working outline to help you visualize your
papers map.
See the Sample Outline document as a guide.

What is next?
Identify where the information on the note cards
can be used in the outline.
I suggest that you write the outline number on
the card (I.A.1 or II.B.3, etc.)
Organize the note cards accordingly.
Begin writing your essay as you have done before.
The only concept that is different is that you are going
to incorporate the outside ideas that are provided on the
note cards.

How do I get the information


about the source into my paper?
See the Writing Your Research Paper section
on p. 357.
Note that you must identify the source and the
page number, if applicable.
Note that you must use quotation marks around
the information that comes word-for-word from a
source.
Note that summarized information does not
require quotation marks.

Where can I look at a sample paper so that I can


SEE how the in-text documentation looks?

See the sample research


paper on pp. 363-374.

Some Situations You Might


Encounter
If you have a direct quote of which you
want to use part, but not all, you may use
ellipsis markings (. . .) to indicate where
you have omitted words.
Example:
Some of the children experienced severe
trauma . . . and were unable to recover their
belongings (Brightman 76).

Some Situations You Might


Encounter
If you have five or more lines of directly
quoted text, you must indent the entire
quote or create a block quote.
The entire quote must be indented ten
spaces from the left margin.
You are not required to use quotation
marks.
See p. 368 for an example

Some Situations You Might


Encounter
You might find information in a source that
was actually gotten from another source.
In that case, you must give credit to the
original author and the author whose
source you are using.
See Quote Within a Quote Sample with
Comments document.

Some Situations You Might


Encounter
If you find a misspelled word in your
source but want to use the information in a
direct quote format, you have two options:
Insert [sic] after the misspelled word
Their [sic] are still many miles left to go.

Insert brackets [ ] with the correctly spelled


word to replace the one that is incorrectly
spelled
[There] are still many miles left to go.

Other Techniques

Rhetorical illustration also known as visual rhetoric -- is an


increasingly popular method of expressing ideas in a concise form.
What is rhetorical illustration?
You see this constantly in textbooks when numerical data is being
compared/contrasted.
You insert a graph to emphasize a point of your discussion.
It is a way to let a concise graph provide information that would take you
many, many lines of text to discuss.
When you draft your paper, you can decide whether you want to present
the data in sentences or in a graph or chart.
You can also provide the illustration and then provide follow-up
discussion about particular point that you want your reader to know or
understand.

See pp. 376-378.


Click here to read more information.

Rhetorical Illustration: A Bonus

If you correctly incorporate


an illustration, chart, or
graph in your essay, you will
automatically earn 5 bonus
points on Essay #4.

How do I type this paper?


The same as you have done the other
papers this term!!!!!
Use the sample research paper (pp. 363374) as a visual aid.
Remember that the Works Cited page
counts as a regular page of your paper; the
outline does not.

Best Wishes As You Work On


This Essay!
Contact me if you need any
assistance!

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