English Writing 300 - College Composition (Smith)

Understanding Assignments
Before you begin looking for information, you should make sure you understand your assignment. If you don't understand the assignment, there is only one person that can best answer any questions - the professor that created the assignment. As they are the creators of the assignments and the subject expert, you want to always ask them for clarification immediately. Don't put it off.

Let the Assignment Guide You
Let the assignment drive what types of resources you choose to explore. Sometimes, your professor will tell you exactly which types to use, but other times, you will need to look at the assignment and figure that out on your own as part of the research process.

 

One of the greatest challenges in starting your search for resources is creating a list of the best terms and phrases that represent your topic. I chose the topic of self-driving cars and created the following list of key words to begin with:

Self-driving cars                                    Artificial Intelligence                     Technology                       Safety           

Ethics                                                      Autonomous vehicles                            Traffic Congestion          

Once I have a list of possible words or phrases that represent my topic(s), I can then pair different ones in search systems, like OneSearch. For example:

(self-driving or autonomous) and cars and safety
Traffic congestion and self-driving cars