Where do I put the thesis statement in my report?

Great question! The answer is—you don’t. Because this is an issue-analysis report, your job here is not to give your reader a main idea. Instead, your job is to simply gather information to help answer the question you posed and then report what you found. Your job is not to figure out what the best solution is or the correct view or the “right” way to think about the issue. You just collect the information that the reader needs and present it to them so that they can decide how they feel about it. Do not think of this report as a chance for you to share your thoughts with your readers; just share your findings with them.

I have a lot of great TikTok videos about my issue saved. Can’t I just use those for my sources?

No. And yes. Of course you can use them as sources for your paper. People post helpful things all across various social media platforms. However, those should not be your only sources. If all of your sources come from social media, how will that convince your reader that you’ve accessed and learned from the most knowledgeable experts and studies out there? During class, we’ll talk about how to find academic sources produced by experts, and you’ll be assigned to look through library resources to find some, so there’s no excuse for not using them.

Okay, so how do I know if a source is a good one to use for my report?

So, the answer to this one isn’t super simple. The good news is that there are plenty of guidelines out there that can help you identify which sources are the best ones to use for your research.

The first guideline is to look in the best places. Scholarly sources—research and articles conducted and written by experts in their fields and published in academic journals—are really the best place to find good information regarding your topic. Before being published in these journals, scholarly articles have to pass through a process called peer review in which a panel of other experts blindly^[1] read the paper and examine it for accuracy, sound theoretical foundations, proper statistical analyses, and so on. Only writing of the highest caliber is allowed to be published, which means that anything that makes it through peer review must be considered as a significant voice in the academic conversation surrounding that topic. The ideas in those articles cannot be ignored because you disagree with them.

Of course, not everything about a given topic is published in scholarly journals, so you also need to figure out how to judge popular sources as well. A popular source is one that is published in any other place that is not an academic journal. Newspapers, magazines, websites, books, blogs—they are all popular sources because there is no peer review process that governs which papers get published and which get rejected and sent back for revision. Anything can get published there, which means that you could get anything from absolute trash all the way to seminal new theories that make significant contributions to the field.

So, you have to find a way to discern the gold from the garbage, and one way you can do that is with the CRAAP Test.^[2] This delightful acronym holds within its letters a mnemonic device to help you remember five different criteria to evaluate when you consider whether a source is good to use for your research or not. It reminds you to check if the source is current, is relevant to your research topic, was written by or used information from authorities^[3] in the field, is accurate, and has a clean purpose. If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” then you have to consider whether that source is the best one to use to help you answer your research question.

A “no” answer does not automatically disqualify a source, though. For example, a source might be older than you want, but if it provided a significant contribution to the development of the field, it might still be a useful source to refer to in your answer. Every “no” answer does need to be carefully considered, though, to determine its effect on the quality of the support it provides for your writing.

My high-school English teacher said I couldn’t use Wikipedia as a source, but it has some good information about my issue. Can I use it as a source here?

Yes. And no. Wikipedia has gotten a bad reputation from lots of secondary-school teachers because of how much their students have relied on it instead of finding better sources. The problem is not necessarily that anyone can edit it—yes, that can produce problems of accuracy. The biggest problem is that it’s an encyclopedia. As we discuss in class, an encyclopedia is a tertiary source, meaning that it does not intend to produce new understanding. An encyclopedia’s purpose is to gather all the known knowledge into a topically accessible source.^[4] The goal of encyclopedias is not to help us understand something that wasn’t understood before. In other words, encyclopedias get all their good information from somewhere else, so why wouldn’t you go to the actual source of the good information, too?

The best way to use Wikipedia, in my opinion, is as an introductory guide to the topic you’re studying. They require sources to be included, so you can follow links to where they got their information from and use those. Therefore, should you use Wikipedia as a source that you cite in your paper? No. Can you use Wikipedia as a source that directs you to better sources? Absolutely.

My annotated bibliography only has three sources, so why is the minimum number of sources for the essay four?

Because the annotated bibliography is not your report. An annotated bibliography is a research preparation tool, not a rough draft. When you write big 40-page papers with 50 or more sources, you will want some way to organize your sources and remember what each one talks about. That’s what an annotated bibliography is for. You read your source and write a summary and evaluation of it so that when you eventually write your paper and inevitably think to yourself, “I had the perfect quote for this…where was that again?” you will have a guide to each of the sources you read that will help you locate that perfect quote. You can go back through and look at your annotations to remember what each source talked about, and if you also wrote down some of the good quotes from the source, then it will be even easier to get to where you need to be.

So, don’t think of your annotated bibliography as a step towards your draft. it’s not. It is, instead, a step towards building good research skills. It is notes about your research, not an outline to help you prepare your essay.

How do I turn my annotated bibliography into my issue-analysis report?

You don’t. Did you read the last answer?

How do I organize my issue-analysis report?

If you’re presenting both sides of an issue, then one way to organize your report is to first present all of the information you found that supports one perspective, followed by all the information that supports the other side.^[5] You could also present one point that you found, followed by the contrasting point from the other side, and go back and forth like that.^[6] What helped you develop a better understanding of the issue? Try presenting the information like that.

What’s the best way to include information from my sources in my essay? Should I quote it, summarize it, or paraphrase it?

In a word, yes. Do one of those.

If the original source has some text that is really well put together, very expressive, incredibly clear, or noteworthy in some other way, then go ahead and quote it directly. Make sure you punctuate correctly and include a citation after it.

If the original text is boring but important,^[7] then paraphrase it. Write the same information using your own words and a different sentence structure, but don’t forget that you still need a citation after it because the ideas came from somewhere else.

If all you need are the main ideas from a source,^[8] then you can summarize it. Make sure you use your own words and sentence structure, and you’ll still need a citation because the ideas aren’t your own.

You keep using the word “citations.” What’s a citation? Are they important?

Citations are incredibly important. They are the only thing preventing you from plagiarizing and getting into some serious academic hot water.

To avoid plagiarizing, all you have to do is tell your readers where the words you quoted or the ideas you paraphrased or summarized came from. That’s it. The trouble is that this can get very messy and confusing very quickly. Do you put the full link right in the middle of the paper? Do you put the author, the book’s title, the chapter heading, the page number, the ISBN number and a link to Amazon in parentheses? Do you throw them all at the end of the paper and hope the reader can figure out which information came from which source? Without some sort of rules or standards that everyone follows, it’s just a mess.

That’s where MLA and APA styles come in handy. They’re just two different sets of rules about how to format the information that your readers need to find the sources of your information. Each of them dictate that, to make papers easier to read, you don’t put the full source information in the text of the essay itself. That full source information goes at the end of the essay on a separate page called the Works Cited page (MLA) or the References page (APA). Definitely check out the sample MLA and APA papers^[9] to see what those citations look like and how they’re formatted. The Quinary Phase section of this book goes into greater detail about these two styles and what they require in terms of documentation, but there’s much, much more than that section alone can handle. You’ll definitely want to become familiar with good online style resources so you can find the answers to your questions as they come up.

What’s the difference between MLA style and APA style? Does it matter which one I use?

The two styles were developed by two different organizations, and so they each value different things and are typically used to write about different topics. MLA stands for the Modern Languages Association, and their style is typically used to write about literature, the arts, languages, and philosophy. APA stands for the American Psychological Association and has been adopted by practically all of the sciences—natural sciences, like physics, biology, and chemistry, as well as social sciences, like sociology, psychology, and education. You should choose the style that best fits the topic you’ve chosen to write about, though I am not going to require that you match the style to your topic.

How do you expect me to memorize all of the picky little rules of MLA or APA? There are so many different things I have to remember!

No joke—there really are so many picky things to remember for each style. Memorizing all of them is kind of ridiculous.

Which is why I don’t ask you to memorize anything. I’m more interested in you learning to follow the rules of a style (any style) than you memorizing the rules of a particular format. Many times, different professors will simply require one style or the other, so learning to follow rules is a skill that you can apply no matter which style is demanded.

So, start by becoming very familiar with where to find the rules for each style, and then figure out how to interpret and apply those rules. I’m a big fan of the Purdue OWL^[10] because that’s the resource I learned to use as a graduate student, but there are many great places online that can help you figure out how to format your citations, so don’t feel bad if you’re not using the one I like. We’ll go over how to format citations quite a bit during class, but feel free to jump into it early if you’d like.

When I do the research, it clearly shows me that I’m right about this issue. Why can’t I just tell the reader that my side is the best?

Because this isn’t a persuasive or argumentative essay. It’s a report. A report’s job is to bring back^[11] the information you find. If you’re not finding information that disagrees with your personal position on your issue, then you’re not looking hard enough or in the right places. You absolutely cannot simply “find” information that supports your position and only report on that. You must do the work to discover and report on what people are saying on the other side of the issue.

Also, look up “confirmation bias” and study it. We all have it and have to work to counteract it. I’m not saying that you’re wrong about this particular issue, but I am saying that you will be the last to realize that you are wrong about it if you are. You absolutely have to put in more work to discover what the people on the other side of your issue are saying and report on that. There are good people who are sincerely interested in the best for the world or country, just like you are, that see things differently, and you have to dive into their views and report them in such a way that your reader can’t tell which side you agree with.