Source Analysis

This assignment provides practice in the skills of tracking down sources, catching the drift of their contents, and assessing their usefulness for your scholarly projects. Here are the steps of the assignment, which is due by 7:00 p.m. Iowa time on Friday. You will enter information from each step in your Classwork Document:

1. Pick one item cited in Nels C. Pearson's article about Endgame (PWeb Documents)
2. Create a bibliography entry for your chosen source in Chicago style (17th edition). The Purdue Online Writing Lab's page on Chicago style may be helpful in providing models. If you use a tool that generates bibliography entries automatically, that's fine as a starting point, but they often get details wrong. Do the final version of your entry yourself, carefully.
3. Write how you would access this source. (You do not necessarily need to access it, just provide a method.)
4. Search for the title and author using the COVID-specific search box ("for distance learning") on the front of the Grinnell Libraries' web page. Is your source available in our library? Online? If online, how?
5. Using the same search interface on the libraries' website, change the search scope to "Books, articles & media everywhere. Do additional ways of accessing your source now appear?
6. Try searching for your source through Google Books and, separately, Google Scholar. What do you discover about using those sources in this case?
7. Write a couple of sentences describing what the source is about. If you have access to the source, you may be able to skim it. Otherwise, you may find help from book reviews or online descriptions. At the end of your description, write how you got your information.
8. Write the title of one other thing the author of your source has written.
9. In one or two sentences, make the best case you can for how your source could be useful for a student writing a paper for English 226.

Adapted from an assignment written by Carolyn Jacobson