By: Melissa Donovan
“‘Research’ is a wonderful word for
writers. It serves as an excuse for EVERYTHING.” — Rayne Hall
Almost all writers rely on research for
facts and information. Even fiction writers and memoir authors, whose work is
either made up from imagination or based on personal experience, will turn to
research to fill in holes and answer questions.
We use encyclopedias, reference books, and
articles from scholarly journals, and we rely on historical facts and data
collected by researchers so we can write truthfully and honestly. We also use
Google, Wikipedia, and a host of other material found online. All this research
is supposed to strengthen our work and lead to better, more credible writing.
We absorb this information and then spit
it back out in the words we write. Then people come along and read our words.
Maybe they go off and repeat what they’ve read. Maybe they rehash our material
in a blog post of their own. Maybe they use it in an academic paper, or perhaps
it inspires a poem or a short story. The information itself is constantly
making the rounds, getting processed, filtered, and regurgitated. How are we to
sift through it all to find reliable facts? How do we tell the truth from the
lies?
And telling truth from lies is essential
in conducting research. Misinformation is widespread, especially on the
Internet.
The Information Age
. . .
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~*~
If
you missed my latest writing & marketing tweets, here they are again:
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