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Online Research for Beginners

June 14th, 2006

You can find the answers to many of life’s persistent questions simply by typing them into google or yahoo. For instance, my pa wanted to know how long to barbecue a london broil flank steak. I typed "grilling london broil" into yahoo and quickly found several sites that had temperature suggestions and cook times. A search engine should be your first stop on the magical online journey for information (All advice in this beginner’s pamphlet will be delivered with unbridled condescension because it is no less than what you deserve).

For a quick overview of a geographical location, historical event or figure, Congressional scandal, try wikipedia. It’s like a more comprehensive Britannica. If a particular article isn’t referenced well or is found to have bias, it will say as much. Such honest folk over at wiki. We love em. We really do.

If you are writing an English paper and want to learn more about your book/essay/poem, try going to sparknotes.com. It’s like cliffnotes but it’s free, so it’s not cheating. You can also go to a search engine and enter the name of the piece you are writing about followed by something like "essay" or "discussion" to find little posted essays and online discussions about the work in question.

If you are trying to write an English paper and you don’t know how to write, go here: http://www.askoxford.com. Good for word usage, common grammar mistakes, all that. There are also online dictionaries (with sound clips for pronunciation even!), slang dictionaries and thesauri. You can search for others, but dictionary.com and thesaurus.com will probably have what you want.

One more word on search engines:  Put a minus before any words you don’t want searched. For instance, "Trojans -condoms". Also, if you are getting too many results, surround your query in quotes to search for pages that have the exact
phrase and not just all the words scattered somewhere on the page.

Entry Filed under: White Papers