Assignment Aim: The purpose of this assignment is to evaluate sources for your paper, take notes on them, and plan where they will fit. You’ll evaluate the sources according to the CRAAP criteria and whether they meet your paper’s information needs. Based on your evaluation, you’ll decide which sources you want to use and take notes on the relevant portions. Finally, you’ll provide a basic outline of your paper including places where you’ll reference outside sources.
Prior to beginning the assignment, first review the Week 5: Lecture #2 – Note-Taking Strategies.
Because information from outside sources will play a supporting role in your term paper (or backup singer), the number of sources you need to consult and the amount of information you need to gather should be relatively limited. In fact, you may find that you only need information from one or two sources in the final version of your term paper. For the sake of learning source-evaluation and note-taking skills, however, you will need to consult five sources for this assignment.
Download the ENGL-110 Source Evaluation & Notes Download ENGL-110 Source Evaluation & Notes template, and save it on your computer.
There are four sections to the template.
Your paper’s rhetorical situation
Five Sources to Evaluate
Notes on the sources you’ll use
Your paper’s outline with sources
1. Your paper’s rhetorical situation
In this section, you’ll enter a lot of information that you’ve been working on since the beginning of class, tweaking here and there based on feedback. You’ll provide the paper’s purpose and audience, which might have changed a bit since you first proposed them. You’ll also give the most updated version of the paper’s thesis. Finally, you’ll present your targeted research question(s), which might be the same ones you used in the week 4 discussion, or they might be new ones you’ve generated based on feedback or from your own reflection on your paper’s information needs.
2. Five Sources to Evaluate
Based on the results of your searches that are based on your targeted research question(s), you’ll list the sources you’ve found that have good potential for your paper. You should list five sources, even if you don’t plan on using all of them.
For each of the five sources you have identified as potentially relevant for your term paper, enter all of the bibliographic information needed for an APA citation. The bibliographic information does not need to use APA formatting for this note-taking activity; that will come later when you create your References page for the term paper. The bibliographic information required for each type of resource can be found at the Purdue OWL’s APA Reference Page Formatting and Style Guide Links to an external site..
Important Requirement: Your readers–including your instructor–need to be able to easily locate every one of your sources–that’s one of the reasons that writers include a reference list in the first place! Please double-check that every source you use includes a hyperlink to the original sources. For instance,
if it’s an online source, create a link and verify that it directs you to the exact reference.
If it’s a book you’ve read online, link to where you read it.
If the text itself is not online, provide some kind of working link to a site like Amazon or the publisher.
Though there is a time and a place to use Artificial Intelligence websites, they are known to create fictitious sources. Using fictitious sources is a form of plagiarism (fabrication), which can lead to a failing grade on assignments or courses; and in the professional world could lead to hefty fines and/or loss of job.
For each of the five sources, enter your assessment of how well the source meets each of the five CRAAP criteria. Refer to the Week 4 CRAAP lecture. This assessment must be in narrative form using complete sentences and your own words. If information in your assessment is taken word-for-word from a source, the copied material must be enclosed in quotation marks with attribution. For example:
The information accompanying the article provides the author’s credentials in the TWI method.: “Dr. Bartosz Misiurek is the TWI lead coach for Europe at Cooper Standard Automotive, CEO of LeanTrix IT Company and founder of the Polish Society of TWI Practitioners.”
For each of the five sources, enter whether or not you will use it, based on your CRAAP assessment. Use complete sentences to explain why or why not you will use it, and also explain what information need and purpose it will serve.
Again, you may find that you need to use only one or two sources to get the information you need for your term paper. It’s okay to use one source for one statistic. That might be all the outside information your paper needs.
3. Notes on the sources you’ll use
Use the method shown in the Note-taking lecture to take notes for the information you will include in your term paper. Indicate summary with “S,” quotes with “Q,” and paraphrase with “P.” . Include at least one academic source and at least one source that provides opposition in perspective, information, or points (these might be the same source). You only need to take notes from the sources you plan to use. The number of notes will depend on the information you’re going to use.
4. Your paper’s outline with sources
Write an alphanumeric or decimal outline for your paper, as discussed in the Outlining for Source Use lecture. Because you already wrote two drafts, this will technically be a “reverse outline,” which is a helpful tool to assist you in stepping back away from your words to look at its structure and to plan changes. The outline must reference at least three main paragraphs that are not the introduction and the conclusion (if you find you have too few paragraphs, consider that your paper might be too short, or your paragraphs might be too long). Use at least two subpoints per main point. Include the sources you indicated on the chart and where you plan on using them. Helpful, but not required: Show places where you use examples from your own experience. You do not need to use complete sentences, but make your points clear and comprehensible to the reader.