Types of Sources

TJ Garden Book

When looking for information, the sources play an important role in legitimacy of a research project. There are three types of sources: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Primary sources are first-hand pieces of information. For example Thomas Jefferson's garden book that kept records of his plants. His original garden plans or letters of gardening advice would be primary. Did he have figs?

A book about TJ's Garden Book

Secondary Sources are second-hand pieces of information. They review or report about the primary sources. An author who writes a book about TJ's garden, or TJ's garden book would be generating a secondary source. A newspaper who publishes an article about the contemporary TJ garden at Montecello today would be secondary source. Maybe the garden has figs today.

Seed catalogs have lists
of garden books

Tertiary Sources are lists of the sources...manuals, guidebooks, catalogs. A mail order catalog of all the gardening books available from a publisher would be a tertiary source because it would be a list. Different publishers would have different list of course.





Researchers try to get as close the primary source as possible.

Dewey Decimal System and Figs

Books arrange by color.

Books can be arranged by color, or many other organization strategies but the most efficient way is with  decimal numbers because decimal numbers are infinite -- so the number of books, in theory, could be infinite. They were arranged by subject, title, and author in card catalog cabinets (see below) at one time. Now they are arranged in the online catalog by subject, title, and author. That way a book can be searched using whatever piece of information that is already known, in my case the subject  figs.

Card Catalog Cabinet

A search in the online catalog would help find out if specific titles for the figgy topic exists at this particular library. For the purposes of this post, the answer is yes, books exist in this particular library for figs. Fig cooking would be in the 640s, and fig planting would be in the 580s. When arriving at the area for the broad decimal category for the subject of figs, a specific book can be found by looking at the spine. Each spine has an identifier called a call number. It is made up of the Dewey Decimal number and, under that, the first two letters of the author's last name.

Shelton Public Schools uses this diagram to explain call numbers.

Libraries!

The word library carries two meanings: a structure and a collection of books. There are several libraries in the Frederick County area that may have books about figs--Handley, Bowman, Lord Fairfax Community College Polk Library. I have several personal libraries but neither one has figgy books. The ones in my offices are books of old fashioned, quirky information collected from the discard piles at both schools. At home, my libraries include bookshelves of studio clip art and a wall to wall, floor to ceiling library of cookbooks and typography books. There are recipes for figgy puddings and fig preserves but nothing about propagating fig trees and selling them..

When information is needed beyond what exists in these libraries, like a bunch of figgy stuff,  I go to a library and see the reference librarian who makes it her/his job to find information....like an information detective.

Guiseppe Arcimboldo's version of a librarian called The Librarian.

Accidental Discovery

While looking up figs and embedded citations, I came across this list of plagiarists. It makes me want to find out what was the lifted part in their work, you know? Mr. Purrington shows the reasons in his explanation of plagiarism (see #5 in the article)

colinpurrington.com

2 Ways to Paraphrase using In-Text Citation

In-text citation is including a small bit of a whole citation along with information that has been paraphrased so the reader can use that piece of source and find the whole citation on the reference page for further reading. It can be done in 2 ways: embedding and referencing.

For example, let's use a book. This is the full citation using Son of Citation Machine:  Van Allsburg, C. (1993). The sweetest fig. Boston, MA: HMH Publishers for Young Readers.

Embedded citing is done when the source is part of the paraphrasing such as According to Van Allsburg (1993), figs can be magical and eating them changes a person's life.  See? The source for the book is part of the paraphrased information.

In a referenced citing, the paraphrasing information would read Figs can be magical and eating them changes a person's life (Van Allsburg, 1993). With referencing the in-text citing happens after the paraphrasing is stated. Notice how the in-text citation comes before the period.

Embedded....citation is part of the paraphrasing
Referenced....citation comes after the paraphrasing

Making Notes

Research revolves around questions and the answers that spring from them. The process of taking notes is actually Making notes...reading information, and summarizing it in original words. Index cards are used for notes, and now spreadsheets. Sources are given a code and that code is used for each note made from that source. This is done for two reasons: to keep order and to avoid plagiarism. A note is anything that answers the question.

Sources and notes can be coded on  a spreadsheet, which makes it easy to cut and paste notes into a paper later on IF THE NOTES WERE PARAPHRASED AND IN-TEXT CITED as the notes were made. Notice how my source was coded with a capital A, and all my example notes are linked to their sources with the same code: A-1 (for the first note), A-2 (for the second note), and so on.

Citation machine expedites the process of preparing the citation and in-text citation. Make sure to use APA format!

readingteacherct.blogspot.com

Active Voice in the Fig Orchard

Active voice is a way of writing that is direct and to-the-point. It is clear and free from unnecessary words that do nothing to clarify the meaning of a sentence. Unlike other ways to write taught in English classes, such as narrative and expository, active voice is used in scientific writing. Examples of writing converted to active voice:

In the research for figgy pudding, you can easily see that puddings are made the way you make fruitcakes. Your oven setting is the same, your ingredients are similar, but the container you use is different.

Active voice: In the research for figgy pudding, it appears to be made much like fruitcakes. Ingredients and oven settings are similar, but the baking container is different.

Differences: you's are deleted, number of words went from 36 to 26, the meaning is clearer and more direct.

talentmechanic.wordpress.com