Zawack's Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines

Amy Miller
English 1022
Marty Sharp
January 31, 2011
Steps for Academic Writing
It is somewhat difficult, it is somewhat frustrating, and somewhat a challenge. No, it is not dating, it is academic writing. According to Chris Thaiss and Terry Zawacki, who wrote Engaged Writers, Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life, defined academic writing broadly as “any writing that fulfills a purpose of education in a college or university in the United States (Thaiss and Zawacki 4).” Academic writing is everywhere a college student can look; history books, journals, research papers, and other entries where sources are listed. Writing a strong academic paper takes a hefty amount of time and effort. The opening sentence in the introduction…show more content…
In the 1950s, Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss were the first to explore credible sources, and they decided a credible source is an individual or an organization sending out a trustworthy, expertise, goodwill, and a persuasive message (Sternadori and Thorson 56). Sources need to be credible, credible sources come from accredited or scholarly journals, books, magazines, and other forms of writing. An actual interview or lecture is allowed, but lectures are very hard to use because it is difficult to quote exactly what was said. In Newspaper Research Journal’s article “Anonymous Sources Harm Credibility of All Stories”, authors Sternadori and Thorson do not understand why anonymous sources in newspapers, magazines, and even news shows do not source their information because a door is then opened to lie and attempt to lie about untrue statements and facts (Sternadori and Thorson 55). The World Wide Web has become the primary location for researching today, but is also a scary place for discredited and phony sites. Most colleges and universities have their own databases, like Ebsco or ProQuest; like Google, but with filtered search engines. The best journals to find are ones which are peer-reviewed and are the primary source. If academic databases are not available, use sources with URLs ending in .edu, .gov, and .org (these are usually…show more content…
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