This week we’ll look at the processing of doing secondary critical research. When we’re writing about literature or other humanities, a primary source is the literary work itself. So Romeo and Juliet, The Empire Strikes Back, and To Kill a Mockingbird are all primary sources. These are the artistic works we’re writing about. The short stories we read last week like “The Lottery” or “Hills Like White Elephants” are all primary sources.
A secondary source is someone writing about the literary work. So if someone writes and publishes an essay about the meaning of “The Lottery,” that’s considered a secondary source.
Next week you’ll be working on your first full essay. In this essay, you’ll be required to cite a secondary source.
Secondary sources may be used for a number of different reasons:
- You may use a secondary source because it supports your idea about the meaning of the text.
- You may use a secondary source to help explain some aspect of the text that you find confusing.
- You may use a secondary source that says something you disagree with, to show that your idea is contrary to the conventional wisdom.
- You may use a secondary source because it says something very clever about the meaning of the text and you like how it’s phrased.
- Or lots of other purposes!
This class is meant to prepare you for future experiences with academic writing in classes about literature and other humanities. To do this, it won’t be good enough to do your research through Google or other Web search engines.
For this class, and future humanities classes, you will want to be able to find secondary sources which come from the academic dabatases which are accessed through the UAF library’s website. These are articles which are written by and for an audience of academic professionals.
Writing 111 is a pre-requisite for this class, and it will generally give you experience with researching in academic databases. However, we’re going to do an assignment this week to help refresh that skill.
Informal Writing 3: Using Academic Sources
Go to the library’s alphabetized database page and find the database called MLA International Bibliography. This database will be your best source for research for this class. (You may also use JStor in the past if you’ve had previous experience with it and are more comfortable with it).
Using MLA International Bibliography or JStor, find an article connected to one of the stories we read for last week’s informal writing. This could be an article about that story, an article about the same author, or an article about the same literary movement or time period.
When reviewing your search results from MLA, you’ll likely find it helpful to click the box which says “Linked Full Text” to ensure you only find results which give you a link to the full text of the article:
If you want to read an article which doesn’t have a link to full text, you can request it via Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Click “Find it” and then, on the resulting page, click “request this item through Interlibrary Loan”:
Read the article and write a brief summary of the author’s ideas.
For Informal Writing 3, write and submit the following:
* A brief summary (at least 250 words) of the ideas in the article you’ve chosen, and how that article might be used in an essay about that story.
* A Works Cited page in MLA format. You can go here if you are unsure how to do this. Skim down to the section headed AN ARTICLE FROM AN ONLINE DATABASE (OR OTHER ELECTRONIC SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE)
Lesson 3 checklist:
* Discussion 3 (remember to submit your post and response to the Discussion 3 assignment portal in Canvas)
* Informal Writing 3