Thursday, January 22, 2015

The Bedford Researcher -- Chapter 5 Summary

Chapter 5 of The Bedford Researcher, titled Evaluating Sources (ES), provides the reader with highly beneficial instructions for, you guessed it, evaluating sources. ES delivers helpful strategies for evaluating the evidence, the author, the publisher, the timeliness, the comprehensiveness, and the genre of a source. By asking questions like “Is enough evidence offered?” or “Is the right evidence offered?” the reader can get a better understanding of whether their source applies to their paper. Other questions, such as “Is the author knowledgeable about the topic?” or “How does the author’s bias affect the information, ideas, and arguments in the source?” help the reader identify if the author is credible or just relaying facts. The second part of Chapter 5 is devoted to evaluating the different types of sources, such as web sites, blogs, social networking sites, newsgroups, email lists, discussion forums, and wikis. After evaluating the different types of sources, Chapter 5 shows the reader how to evaluate each one differently. This can be done, according to ES, by evaluating the relevance and accuracy of the web site as well as the date it was created. ES recommends using the most scholarly sources available. Chapter 5 is a fantastically written, clearly instructional section that is essential to effectively evaluating the credibility, relevance and comprehensiveness of sources.

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