Monthly Archives: October 2017

Body Paragraphs

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In the body of our essay, we follow up on the thesis statement.  In the 5-paragraph format, we would devote three paragraphs to advancing our thesis, beginning each one with a topic sentence stating the paragraph’s main idea. Given the above example of a thesis statement, regarding Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize in literature, our three topic sentences might be:

Examining Bob Dylan’s response to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, we see signs of deep humility, anticipating his reaction to the Nobel Prize.

Dylan’s behavior, when receiving the Officier de la Legion d’honnuer, evidences discomfort over the honor, presaging his response to the Nobel award.

Bob Dylan’s remarks about previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature show that he views himself unworthy of that honor, thereby foreshadowing his response to the award.

Sentence and Paragraph Breaks

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Here is a sentence from a well-known novel:

He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath.

http://www.victorianlondon.org/books/tale-02.htm

At 79 words and more than four lines, even with a semi colon break after the first 20 words, this sentence taxes the reader. We may forgive Charles Dickens long sentences like these in The Tale of Two Cities because literary styles change and Dickens is a great author. However, our readers will not forgive us if our sentences seem interminable.  Readers get lost in long sentences, sometimes because the writers themselves got lost. If we keep our sentences shorter than two lines, we will find it easier to order our thoughts and our readers will find it easier to follow our thinking.  As a rule of thumb, a sentence longer than two lines is too long.

Long paragraphs, like long sentences, can put off our readers.  If our essay has paragraphs that run more than a page or take up most of a page, one look at them may cause our readers, like the horses on Dickens’ hill, to call it quits. A shorter paragraph—perhaps five sentences—is more inviting and apt to be easier to understand.

               

Conducting Online Research

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If we have ready access to the internet, in a matter of moments we can do a Google search and find an abundance of sources. And, we could use the CRAAP test to evaluate them. The trouble is that we cannot possibly apply the CRAAP test to all of the sources that could pop up when we do a Google search.  Suppose our professor assigns an essay on the symbolism of bullfighting in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises and we get started by typing the name of the novel into Google and searching. The result would be 7 million links. The reason millions of links pop up is that if we type in The Sun Also Rises, but do not put that title in quotation marks, then our search engine looks for any phrases with “sun,” “also,” and “rises.” However, these phrases could contain other words as well. For example, if there were an internet site with the sentence, “Picasso paints sun rises but also moon rises” the site would come up as one of our results.

To limit our results to just the words we want in the order we want them, we need to use quotation marks, that is, search for “The Sun Also Rises.” Searching with quotation marks, our results drop from 7 million to 557,000, a considerable reduction but still a wildly unmanageable number of results. We need then to be even more specific in our search.

Since our topic concerns symbolism in Hemingway’s novel, we can add the word “symbolism” to our search to reduce the results even further. Putting both symbolism and The Sun Also Rises in quotation marks, and joining them with and, that is, searching with “The Sun Also Rises” AND “Symbolism” reduces our results by more than 200,000, but still leaving us with an impossibly large number of sites, 321,000.

If we are ever going to arrive at a manageable number of relevant internet sites, we need to be increasingly specific. Searching with “The Sun Also Rises” AND “Symbolism” AND “Bullfighting” drops the number of sites down to 26,000; searching with “The Sun Also Rises” AND “Symbolism” AND “Bullfighting” AND “Critical Discussion” reduces our total number of sites to 240. So, by using quotation marks, AND, and adding search words, we have gone from 7 million results to 240. That is good but not good enough.

To get from good to good enough, we need to begin with a search engine that presorts sites so that many of the ones that would fail the CRAAP test never show up in the first place. If we switch from the Google search engine to the Google Scholar search engine (we can find it easily enough by searching for Google Scholar in the Google search engine) and repeat the above search pattern the difference in results in dramatic. An initial search of The Sun Also Rises in Google Scholar gives us 456,000 as opposed to 7 million initial results. Searching with quotations marks: “The Sun Also Rises,” yields 10,000 results instead of 557,000. Searching with “The Sun Also Rises” AND “Symbolism” gives us 1,450 sites in Google Scholar, as opposed to 321,000 in in Google.  A search with “The Sun Also Rises” AND “Symbolism” AND “Bullfighting” in Google Scholar give us 233 sites as opposed to 26,000 in Google. Finally, searching with “The Sun Also Rises” AND “Symbolism” AND “Bullfighting” AND “Critical Discussion” in Google Scholar gives us 12 results instead of the 240 with the general Google search engine.

The moral from the above comparison is that where and how we search matters a great deal. General search engines are too general. We want to begin our search with search engines that have done a lot of presorting for us. Google Scholar is but one of these.  For an annotated list entitled “100 Time-Saving Search Engines for Serious Scholars (Revised)” see http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2012/07/100-time-saving-search-engines-serious-scholars-revised/  For tips on how to search efficiently, using  AND, OR, NOT (so-called Boolean operators), the following sites are helpful: “Database Search Tips” Boolean operators” http://libguides.mit.edu/c.php?g=175963&p=1158594 and https://library.uaf.edu/ls101-boolean