Readings March 30th

Since coming to Washington State University, and for English 101 in particular, I use the online library resources to find sources for my papers. At first the online library database was a bit confusing but after the lab at the library explaining the system and being exposed to a basic walk through of it, I found it very helpful to find a wide variety of sources on several particular topics. I specifically use the Griffin catalog and the WorldCat resources to find scholarly resources for my papers in English 101. I find Worldcat to be most useful because of the similarity of the search with Google and the ease of filtering content to find exactly what I'm looking for. After finding a few sources that I deem helpful I typically read the abstract of each source and check to see if it was a peer reviewed, scholarly article or journal and then narrow my list of sources down to fit exactly what I want and what I think will work best in my paper. A peer reviewed article is typically the best article or source that one can find for writing papers because it has usually been written by a credibly person, such as a professor or expert in a particular field, and has then been dissected and analyzed by a wide range of knowledgeable people in the field of writing. This makes these sources very useful and strengthens the validity of one's paper. Another bonus of finding sources using the Washington State University online library database is that the citation of most sources you find are already posted on the page of the abstract if the article or journal. This makes writing papers much more efficient because it cuts down on the time it takes to write a proper citation.