Hi everyone! I found this week's reading really informative and helpful. It reminded me of a research paper I did in high school. However, the point of that paper was more about citing sources correctly and gathering information related to my research question, rather than considering all the aspects of a really effective and complete research paper discussed in The Craft of Research From Topics to Questions by Wayne C. Booth. Aspects of such a paper include answering specific questions and producing a conclusion that establishes exigence, or what called the author (us) to write about such a problem, and why the readers should care. Booth warns against the "aimless collection of data," (16) which is something I think can easily lead a research paper astray. Rather than just Googling your topic and quoting any remotely reliable news source that'll have the paper concluding with "Thus we see many differences and similarities between..." (9), Booth suggests a few tips, as well as three steps to developing a solid research proposal. I agree that reviewing, writing down, and following these steps would be a reasonably good place to start a research proposal.

Booth outlines his three steps as:

1. Naming the topic you are researching

2. Indicating what you want to know about your topic through an indirect question

3. Stating what you want your reader to take from your research and why they should care

While these steps seem straight forward and simple to follow, I'm realizing I will have to read through lots of papers and articles to really settle on a topic I think is worth dedicating a research paper to. A tip I learned a while ago was when you want to filter out Google to only higher education articles, like ".edu," for example, type this into google: "Your topic: "edu" " and then you will only receive search results of ".edu" sites. Secondly, the scoping out of reliable sources reminds me of the existence of media bias charts. I've included some on the left. Booth's article suggests to "Google your topic, but not indiscriminately. Use Google Scholar, a search engine that focuses on scholarly journals and books" (7). Scholarly articles are a great place to find reliable information. However, corroboration of sources is also essential to confirm findings. When using Google, to perhaps corroborate a claim in a scholarly article, a media bias chart is a fascinating tool that organizes online media sources into a spot based on a y-axis of "reliability," and an x-axis of "bias," that ranges from "left" to "right." Furthermore, there are line indicators that further distinguish the reliability and validity of media sources. I think contextualizing sources throughout the research process is an important step after deciding upon a quality research proposal, and maybe the media bias chart presents some things to think about when initially reading about our topics.