Chapter 5 Reading Synthesis

This reading was again pretty repetitive and didn't really inform me of anything I didn't know already. The downside to being in an intro English class is that the text is created on the idea that the people reading it are inept and have no concept of how to write intellectually at all. So, when people who actually can write well and know how to analyze the validity of sources already start reading about how to do these things for 20 pages,  it starts to become frustrating. But, the chapter just discussed basically how to get your research paper started. Once you figure out your general idea, you start searching for information on it and in doing so, start narrowing your search until you refine your idea to a very specific topic. From there, you can start figuring out what sources you want to use and determining whether or not they are valid sources that you can use. When doing this you want to look at things like the author, date of publication, if it's a journal, scholarly article etc. Once you figure out if the source is one you can actually use, then you can start sorting them out into primary and secondary sources. Primary sources being ones that prove your argument and secondary being ones that just kind of help you comment on the topic but don't really provide much factual backup for your statements. After this you can work on citing your sources and things such as an annotated bibliography in order to further prove why your sources are useful in proving your argument.