Happy Monday everybody! Hopefully you enjoyed your weekend and are ready to crank out another week. Today I will be talking about one of the skills I attained through my major that I ended up doing a lot, and that is research writing.

Writing for research is a bit different than creative writing and it requires a little more time in my opinion. The problem you face when you’re writing for research is what sources you are using are credible. Credibility plays a huge part in research writing because if you find the information on Wikipedia, it can’t be used as a fact.

Some of the obstacles you must overcome in order to write for research are finding valid sources to use, understanding what makes a source valid or invalid, and using the information you found and your own knowledge to create strong statements and personal opinions.

Overcoming these obstacles isn’t very hard but it can be time consuming. The best way to overcome finding credible sources and understanding what makes them credible is to know what to look for. For example, you wouldn’t use Wiki or Yahoo answers or a blog as a credible source because those are at times personal opinions and anyone has access to writing those answers. Websites ending in .gov or .org are credible because they can be government sites or scholarly journals and articles that show rapport with the information being provided. Taking the extra step to see that a source is valid is essential in research writing and will help you with the work and help you seem like you know what you’re talking about.

The solution is simple with research writing: do the research and learn about what you’re writing about so you know what to say. You don’t want to blab on about a topic you don’t understand or use sources that don’t understand either. You want to make yourself look credible and knowledgeable about the topic and validating your sources and checking multiple sites will help you become a better writer for research.

Say you’re doing a research paper on the relationship between grades of students who fo drugs and students who don’t, what websites do you try and use for pointers? What websites do you avoid? How do you site the sources? Comment below so I can see if you’re aware of what to stray from and what to use when research writing. That’s the cup o’ Joe for today, have a great night guys!

-Joe