Writing a Paper for Me

As the author, you have a responsibility to your readers to choose the best possible resources and also to make clear the degree to which the sources you utilized are high quality and trustworthy (or not). Some discussion of the author's own analysis of such quality is therefore warranted. Of course, that means that you need to think through such issues, do such analysis in the first place as you work through the research process.

In what ways might the data from a given source be biased?
How can you analyze it's quality?
How trustworthy is is?

Consider the following rules of thumb:

Look for the bias. While all writing is done from one or another perspective, some biases are just more up front and/or obvious than others. It is up to you to read with that in mind and evaluate the quality of your sources. Examples:
- The New York Times leans left, but has a strong reputation for checking its facts. When it makes errors of substance, it prints retractions. Unless you go looking, however, you might not notice the retraction.
- The National Inquirer is known to be a sleazy source written for the undereducated. That does not necessarily mean that the information you find there is incorrect. What it does mean is that, correct or not, your audience is not going to take information you announce comes from there seriously.
Evaluate your sources for bias. What are people who tend to grab resources and utilize them blindly? College dropouts. That's a smart ass answer to a tough question, though. As you research, evaluate according to
1. Audience: What words would you use to describe the text source? Who is likely to read it? How can you tell?
2. Purpose: What is the purpose of the text? Is the purpose stated plainly where you can see it? How well does it meet that purpose? Should you announce its purpose to your audience? Why?
3. Content: How well does the content support the purpose? Is the content quality, relevant, readable, interesting, accurate, entertaining, and appropriate for the audience? Are the data traceable? How/when was it developed, and according to what criteria? Have the results been repeated by others? When and how? To what degree can you trust the data for your own needs and those of your audience? Once you use it in your own writing, you are staking your credibility on it.
4. Author: What do you know of this person and his or her reputation? Remember the recent cloning hoax in Korea; sometimes experts lie, are sloppy, or turn out to be just plain wrong even with the best of intent. At the very least, Google the author and check his or her credentials, other publications, and the type of people/publications that habitually quote your expert. Anyone who blindly quotes Hwang Woo-Suk without having done the minimal research necessary to find that this is the man who perpetrated the cloning hoax deserves an F.
5. Design: How well does the look of the text communicate or its purpose or is it misleading? How can you tell? Do the color palette, image, and type choices support the content's purpose, call attention away from it, or actively mislead?
6. Writing: Is the writing clear and respectful of readers and subjects? Does the writing voice let readers know who the writer really is? Is the author/owner/date clearly listed? Is the text essentially free of errors in grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation?
7. Organization: Does the text make it easy to discover its own sources? Does it make further research easy or difficult? Does this seem deliberate or just awkward?
8. Marketing: Who has a stake in this material? Is it paid for by a corporation or individual with an interest in managing the information and/or audience?
9. Persuasions: What emotional and/or intellectual manipulators can you find in the text? In what ways do they disqualify the data?
Always double check the 'facts' you use. Do you implicitly trust encyclopedias? More fool you. There was a recent scandal in which anonymous revisers to Wikipedia's entry on him libeled John Seigenthaler. Consider the problem:

Wikipedia is developed by anybody who happens by. You cannot know who that is or the quality of that person's expertise. That said, a recent study in Nature (15 Dec. 2005) that compared four articles on the same subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia suggests the following:

"Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively" (Russ Mayfield's Blog, December 15, 2005).

Now, I find the average of one serious error per article as well as over 100 other problems) in either source pretty scary. One can only hope that they were different errors, which would make it more likely that you would catch them.

That said, the other issue is transparency. Anyone who reads Wikipedia knows that it is impossible to tell who wrote (or rewrote) an article. Note how Wikipedia discusses it in their "Introduction":

"Don't be afraid to edit articles—anyone can edit, and we encourage you to be bold (but please don't vandalize)! Find something that can be improved, either in content, grammar or formatting, and fix it. You can't break Wikipedia. Anything can be fixed or improved later. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet!"

If anyone can edit, anything can be in an article and, in the short run at least, any article can be vandalized or just plain inaccurate and you will not be able to tell who stands behind the information. Is the author an expert, a nutcase, or both? Wikipedia is useful, but none of us at the university level takes EITHER Britannica or Wikipedia as final places to do research. They are simply useful places from which to gather enough initiating data for keywords to get started in the research.

This example also explains why all bibliographic entries on web sites must state not just when a web site was written or last revised (often that information does not exist, in which case just say n.d. for no date), but also the date when the researcher found the material. One day before or after, after all, the content could be different.

2002; Last revised July 14, 2008
Dr. Bonnie Duncan
bduncan@millersville.edu
1-717-871-2080
English Department
Millersville University
Millersville, PA 17551

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