| Using Aristotle's Topics and Modern Tagmemics to Discover a Working Thesis
This slide show asks you a variety of questions to jumpstart your thinking and stretch your ideas about your topic. The questions are age-old categories that the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed as ways one could think about a topic. These are followed by three more ways to think about a topic that a modern thinker Ken Pike conceived.
So have at it. Take on these questions and approaches to your topic. Some may not make sense at first, and that's rather the point: to shift the way think about your topic in the hopes of discovering an approach to a thesis.
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| Smart Web Search
Just about anyone who uses computers can pop a term into a search engine like Google. As a scholar you want to flex Google's search muscle power and use all the tricks of the research trade: Boolean search shortcuts, field searches, and directories. Here are some reminders.
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| Researching the Case for Your Thesis
Just like an attorney defending a client before a jury, you are building a case in support of your thesis when you write a research paper. A lawyer wants to bring only the best evidence and most expert witnesses to the stand; likewise, you want to use the best examples from primary texts and quote the most authoritative secondary texts.
This slideshow reviews some of the sites to steer clear of when researching your topic.
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| Notes on Note-Taking for Research
Here are some formatting reminders on best practices for taking research note cards for information and indexing your sources. Don't forget to jot down the MLA documentation data as you go!
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| Bibliographies
This slide show reviews the most common citations in MLA style and introduces online bibliography generators to help you with your Works Cited and Works Consulted bibliographies.
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