Evaluating Information: Exercise One

Objective:  The purpose of this exercise is to help you to start thinking critically about how information influences the writing process.  The conclusions and theories you reach in your paper are largely dependent upon the quality of information that you retrieve.  How do you know an author is an expert in his or her field, or if a piece of information is largely unsubstantiated?  This exercise will use a step by step approach that may help you to determine the quality of the book, article, or web page that you are including in your paper as an information resource.

Step 1:  Locate an information source. Find an article, book, or web page that you feel would be an excellent information resource for your paper.  You will want to find something that is at least 3 or 4 pages long.  It is very important that you read and reread the piece of information for this exercise.  Write down the citation:

Step 2:  Who is the audience for your author? Your author is trying to relay this information to a certain population.  Determine if your author is writing this for the general public or for other subject specialists in the field.

Step 3: Finding out more about the author.  You need to find out why your author is a specialist in his or her field.  Anyone can be a publisher, but not anyone can be an authority on a subject.  Find out what why your author is a specialist in his or her field.

Step 4:  Subject Matter Diversity.  Besides the point that your author is trying to prove, what other theories, arguments, or findings does your author mention in your information source? Has your author done a good job of exploring the diversity of the subject matter?  Your author may be using these arguments to either add or to refute his or her findings.

Step 5:  Biases and Influencing Factors.  Do you think your author may have any biases for writing this information?  Think about why the author is actually writing this piece of information.  

Step 6:  Other publications. What else has your author written that is related to the subject matter?  Find two other pieces of information your author has written.  

Step 7: What do others say about your author? Now it gets a little harder.  Find two other sources that reference your author or the information your author is talking about from step 1.  This could be from a journal article, book, web page, or newspaper.  Why are they referencing this information or your author?

Step 8: One Page Paper.  Now that you have found out more information about the article and about the subject area, please write a one page paper on why this particular piece of information relates directly to your thesis.  Attach the original article, along with copies of your sources from steps 6 and 7.