Below are helpful links for students.
On doing philosophy
Some of my courses include a writing workshop. The first day of the workshop I give a presentation on how to write a philosophy paper. The slides for the presentation can be found on our course's Blackboard site. The second day of the workshop the students review each others' papers, given the information from the presentation, and fill out a short review form that I hand out at the beginning of class. The form can be found here.
Jim Pryor's page on arguments and philosophical methodology.
Sources
Students in my classes are always welcome to use sources beyond those in the assigned readings when they are writing papers. I do, however, insist that any source used be vetted for reliability. (And preferably be properly academic, although on some topics non-academic sources may be appropriate.)
Anything found in Cook Library (or available through Inter-library loan from the same) is acceptable.
Any articles from JSTOR are okay.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a very good resource for quick information about philosophical views or philosophical figures. The bibliographies attached to SEP entries are also often very useful, as they can direct you to things you will know to be relevant to the topic you are interested in. Please use the Stanford Encyclopedia instead of Wikipedia.
And another very useful resource is PhilPapers. This website contains links to philosophy papers on many other websites. Many of the papers are freely available, some are not. If you encounter a link to a paper that you cannot access for free, try accessing it from on-campus. We have subscriptions to some on-line resources.