Hi all,

Here is my general feedback for your posts from March 28th. For these posts, I asked you to begin looking for sources and creating citations for those sources. Overall, I am seeing four things that many of you need to work on as you move forward with the research for, and writing of, the Op-Ed

1. Many of you need to format your citations to look the way they will on your works cited page. You might look at Juanā€™s post for how these citations should look:Ā Ā Ā https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/garciaeng1121-hd40spring2022/2022/03/28/research-prep-5/

2. Some of you still need to go further in narrowing down your focus for the Op-Ed. 

For example, Sarah writes that her topic is ā€œthe affects that social media has on the worldā€. This is a good topic. And she has clear interests within her topic; she writes, that she wants to know about the following: ā€œthe addicting nature of social media and how it is affecting the psychology and mental health of people today? How social media can spread misinformation and what big tech is currently doing about it today? And why and how are free apps free exactly?ā€

But she still needs to focus in a bit. For example, I think she could write a good Op-Ed on why big tech need to step in and censor certain topics or types of posts on social media. But what type of social media are we talking about? What kinds of things should be censored? Why? These are all things she needs to think about in order to narrow down her topic. 

And Sarah is not alone. Many of you need to look at this example and also figure out how to narrow down your focus.

3. You should all take some time to make sure your sources are reputable. The library databases already filters sources for you. But if you are getting the information from the internet, then you need to do the following to investigate the credibility of your sources:

  • Google the publication and read about it (and not just on the publications site)
  • Look to see if there is an author and clear publication date
  • Look up the authorā€™s background and find out what their job is, what else they have published, produced, etc., and making sure they are an expert in the field they are writing about
  • Look to see if the piece has citations

None of these things is enough to tell you if the piece is reputable. But together they will help you decipher the sources credibility.

And, a note on Wikipeida: There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia as a place to find out about a topic generally. And you can even look at their citations for things that might be helpful. But Wikipedia cannot be one of your sources.

4. Most of you seem to have a variety of sources but make sure your sources are not all of the same type or from the same place. If this is the situation you are in, then you need to look further and find more sources.