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Tuesday Tip: Gathering Information on the Web
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Last week's tip offered advice about using dictation software to streamline the research phase of writing research papers. Today let's look at some ideas for gathering information on the internet.
When I was in high school and college, finding information for writing a research paper began with going to a library and searching for books by going through the card catalog (actual paper cards in long, wooden drawers) and for articles by perusing the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature (a twelve-foot shelf of orange or navy blue bound books arranged by year). Reference books could not be taken from the library, so had to be scanned for useful data at the oaken tables in the reading room. For articles one had to find the paper issue, or the grainy microfiche version, of the periodical and make a photocopy, which could be taken away, along with non-reference books that had been checked out. Then began the tedious process of poring through everything and writing bibliography cards and note cards, in preparation for writing an outline and eventually a rough draft of the paper. Often, finding enough relevant information was difficult.
Today's students face some very different obstacles when researching for a paper. First, physically travelling to a library is not as essential as it once was. A large amount of excellent information is available on the internet, via special online databases supported by schools and public libraries, or simply via Ask.com or Google. Unlike in years past, often the biggest difficulty is being deluged with too much information. I just Googled "Battle of the Bulge," for instance, and was rewarded with a list of 1.26 million relevant pages. Realizing that some of that sea of relevance is probably related to dieting sites, I added "history" to the list of search terms, and the number was magically reduced to a mere 704,000. If a student were to spend an average of thirty seconds looking at each of those pages, it would take 735 eight-hour days! The strategies to reduce this information to a more manageable pile is beyond the scope of this article, but this example of information glut is indicative of just how much different the task of researching has become.
Okay, so let's say that you've winnowed the 760,000 hits from your initial search down to seventeen relevant, high-quality web pages about your topic. You could print out those pages, or read them online, and begin the long process of handwriting notes on index cards. Or you could make web technology and your computer work for you. Try this:
1. Select all of the text on your web page. You can do this by clicking and dragging your pointer from top to bottom of the page, or you can just go to your browser's menu and go to EDIT-> SELECT ALL.
2. Go to EDIT-> COPY.
3. Open a new word document and got to EDIT-> PASTE. Now you have all of the information from your web page in your document.
4. To get rid of all of the formatting that makes a web page look good but makes the text behave strangely in your word document, go to FILE-> SAVE AS, and save your document to your desktop as a "text only" document. Now close the document, ignoring the warning that you are about to lose all of the document's formatting. Now, reopen your text document by going to FILE-> OPEN RECENT. This time save it as a regular word document, and you're be ready to begin working.
5. Instead of writing down everything you want to keep as you read through your document, delete everything that you don't want. You want to end up with a list of extracted, bulleted information. Try to delete as much as possible of the author's sentences, so that when you begin to write your paper, the sentence structure is all yours, and you won't run the risk of plagiarism.
6. Now you can resize your word document page to the size of a 3 x 5 or 4 x 6 notecard for printing straight from your computer. To download preformatted note card sized document, click here. Note that to end one card and begin the next, go to INSERT-> BREAK-> PAGE BREAK. Text on the resulting cards will be perfectly centered both horizontally and vertically. Be sure to include the bibliography of the source in the footer of the document, so that it will be automatically printed on every card.
This process of managing website information will enable you to gather information rapidly and to put it into a form in which it can be easily sorted and cited.
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Sincerely, 
Kevin D. Dohmen, M.Ed. Learning Consultant21 West Caton Avenue Alexandria, VA 22301-1519 --- 703.683.9617 kevindohmen@verizon.netwww.kevindohmen.netthe art of learning for the information age
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