English Writing 300/33 - College Composition (Borders)

One of the greatest challenges in starting a new research project is deciding which search terms best describe your topic as you begin the search for resources.  Try to be really succinct/to the point and use just a couple of keywords instead of typing long sentences. The video explains all of this quickly (less than 2 minutes!), so please watch it now. Here are few more tips where I use some of the words and phrases I learned about in the newspaper articles I shared with you during our live session:

• Enter keywords that represent your topic:   
• Limit searches to two or three keywords:  independent gas stations       
• Don't search with sentences, questions, or long phrases.
• Combine terms with OR to broaden:  
  oil refinery OR petroleum refinery (these would find either items)
• Combine terms with AND to narrow:  California AND gas blends (this would only find items with both these phrases)
• Place quotation marks around words you wish to be searched as a phrase: "gas tax"

Video by CRC Library