Business Writing @ Purdue

I have never been a fan of editing or censoring Facebook profiles, especially to make yourself seem more professional than what you are. I believe eventually all of the negative images or unprofessional images will “come to the light” so to speak. I think that students should be aware of the consequences of portraying themselves in such a way, however, is it worst to hide some of the things you have done or don’t do them at all?

The readings from chaper 15 and the information on OWL was very similar and very common sense. I don't think I need that much information on how to research websites. I think that it is a good reminder for us to check for reliability, credibility, and validity on the websites and sources we use. I think the thing that helps the most is just knowing what to look up when searching on the internet.

I found that using the web as a resource is both a readily available huge resource and a place requiring loads of analysis and sifting to find appropriate data. 

Discuss how you implemented the readings from Tuesday when postng your sources. What parts did you find useful? Was there information that you thought was less useful for you? Was there information that you already knew?

I thought this reading was actually helpful once I did it. There is a lot of information that i didn't know about searching on the web and how to find exactly what you are looking for. The fact that many companies pay to have their site come up on a search engine is interesting , because this could make the user of the search engine think that they are getting the best information when it is really just put up there because that company paid for its site to show up. I know that the site does have to be relevant to the search words, but i can see how this problem could hinder many searches.

The reading from Tuesday was basically telling us helpful and useful ways to search for information on the web. I knew a lot of the tips that they were talking about like putting quotation marks around words or phrases that you want kept together so the search engine doesn’t break them up. Also the use of advanced searches so that you do not get thousands of findings, you will only get the specific ones you are looking for. What I use the most is the rewording of phrases. I will put in a phrase and then think of synonyms to put in to see if I get different findings.

Sorry I do not want to sound rude and I know that these readings are suppose to be review but isn't his subject matter a little elementary for college juniors and seniors. I can understand the importance of a refresher coarse but if you do not know how to search for exact phrases with quotations or that .edu and .gov are usually more reliable than any website off of Google then I can't imagine how you have survived your college career. I had a kid in my class who made a very good point, he refused to accept wikepedia as a source for research papers.

The reading for last week helped me evaluate my sources’ credibility and also helped me to site my sources. The main problem I ran into was finding credible sources according to the reading on the owl site. The last page of the owl site compared the credibility of websites vs. text or written documents. A point in the reading is that anyone who has a computer can create content, which means that the things we find on line can be false.

In the readings for Tuesday I found the THomson Handbook to be less than useful. It talked about how I should be keeping a day to day record of my project status and any information I might be finding. The book states that this is useful for keeping yourself on track. However, I think it is a highly distracting tool to be using for a research project and quite frankly, I think it is very unrealistic. I feel that If a person were to keep a daiily log of his or her project it would be one more chore that he or she would have to complete every day.

Much of the what I applied from the readings was how to annotate sources. I always forget and have to refer to examples like the ones in the Thomson Handbook to make sure I doing it right. I'm also more used to the APA format, and my group is leaning towards MLA, so having the Thomson Handbook has been helpful in that respect. Some things in the Online Research chapter of the Handbook were things I already knew, like putting quotes around keywords to narrow results.