Mike Roche: Blog Post 1

In my own writing, research is the cure to my writer's block. Often, I will find I can't complete the next line of a poem because there seems to be no information on the topic left in my head on the particular subject I'm writing about. When this happens, it's usually a good time for me to go looking for interesting facts. If I'm writing a poem about astrophysics I will usually Google it and see what kind of stuff shows up, or like Jamie mentioned in his blog, use Wikipedia. It's not usually a lot of information I need, just some clarification here or a tidbit there to give me some inspiration and keep me writing. And as we read in the reading, Wikipedia is frequently updated; so it can often reflect recent changes in a scientific topic like astrophysics.

The way I research for this class will be different, though. I've learned from the readings that I need to start paying more attention to my sources' credibility, especially when writing a scholarly research paper. This week's reading emphasized the need to verify the credibility of our sources. One helpful way to evaluate it, I found, is by looking at the publishing company. Is it a traditionally "big-name" one like Harper-Collins? Or if it's not, is it at least a university press? Just noticing this stuff will be very helpful when I am collecting sources for research papers.