Write In Time

Resources and assistance with your research in this course.

Potential Keywords for your WRIT 1001H Assignment

Think carefully about the terms you'll search for.  Don't use a full sentence or question in a scholarly database.  Instead, select the most important term(s) and join them with "and" or "or".  See the Keyword Tutorial if you don't understand this.

Assignment

Topic 1

A few suggestions for search terms are:

  • lexicography
  • crowdsourcing and dictionaries
  • "urban dictionary"
  • "oxford english dictionary" or OED
  • wiktionary

Topic 2

A few suggestions for search terms are:

  • "prescriptive grammar"
  • "descriptive grammar"
  • "language usage" and "social class"
  • subject: grammar and "social class"
  • "english language" and grammar and "social class"
  • dialect and "social class"
  • dialect and gender

Be creative; think of your own topic and potential keywords.  Some search terms will work better in some databases than others.

When You Find One Good Document

  • Look at the bibliography to help you find more!  What did that author read in order to write this paper?
  • What terms are used in the title or abstract?  These might be ideas for more search terms you can try.

NOT Scholarly

The following sources are interesting, informative, and probably reliable.  But they are NOT scholarly. 

Newspapers and magazines are written by writers, not scholars.  They may report on scholarly work, but they aren't scholarly publications. If you're seeing a lot of colour photos, click-bait, and ads - it's not scholarly. Find the actual scholarly publication they based the story on. Look for the author's qualifications - like a PhD.

Blogs and websites are not publications.  They're not permanent, so they can change. Scholars don't publish papers in blogs. Their research normally requires them to publish in recognized journals.  Look for a  journal title, volume, issue to show that it was actually published somewhere permanent.

Bibliographies are an essential part of scholarly communication; if there isn't one, it's not scholarly.

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