This tier is essentially everything else. These types of sources—especially Wikipedia—can be helpful in identifying interesting topics, positions within a debate, keywords to search, and, sometimes, higher-tier sources on the topic. They often play a critically important role in the early part of the research process, but they generally aren’t (and shouldn’t be) cited in the final paper.

Third, there are some great books from non-academic presses that cite their sources; they’re often written by journalists. All three of these sources are generally well researched descriptions of an event or state of the world, undertaken by credentialed experts who generally seek to be even-handed. It is still up to you to judge their credibility. Your instructors, librarians, or writing center consultants can advise you on which sources in this category have the most credibility.

Scholarly articles appear in academic journals, which are published multiple times a year to share the latest research findings with scholars in the field. They’re usually sponsored by an academic society. To be published, these articles and books had to earn favorable anonymous evaluations by qualified scholars. Who are the experts writing, reviewing, and editing these scholarly publications? Your professors. We describe this process below. Learning how to read and use these sources is a fundamental part of being a college student.

This kind of thesis-first approach to research becomes harmful, however, when we assume that it is the only or the most valuable way to conduct research. Evidence of this widespread assumption is easy to find. A simple search for the research process on Google will yield multiple hits hosted by academic institutions that suggest a researcher needs a thesis early in the research process. For instance, the University of Maryland University College’s Online Guide to Writing and Research suggests that a thesis should be developed as soon as source collec-tion gets underway, though that thesis may change over time. In the book, A Writing Process, author Vinetta Bell suggests that the thesis-writing process begins during the “preliminary research” stage. This strategy is endorsed by multiple research library websites, such as the University of Minnesota.

Research can be productively used in this way to verify assump-tions and arguments. Sometimes what we need is just a little support for an idea, a confirmation of the best approach to a prob-lem, or the answer to simple questions. For example, we might believe the new iPhone is the best smartphone on the market, and use research on the phone’s specs to prove we’re right.

Our collective belief in the importance of definite answers impacts many areas of our lives, including how we understand the process and purpose of research. Specifically, it leads to a thesis-first research model in which research is only used to verify our existing ideas or theses. (Alison Witte discusses this bad idea in a previous chapter.) In this model, there is no room for doubt or ambiguity. We assume we need to know the answers to our problems or ques-tions before the process gets underway, before we consult and eval-uate what others have said.

Perhaps some of the confusion over the role of research in writ-ing, and the writing process, comes from the structure of classical argument that is often included as part of the organizational pattern for the research paper. When argument is taught, it’s frequently connected to the historical practices of Greek and Roman rheto-ric. Rhetoric, the study of the ways to use language to persuade a listener, was one of the core subjects of formalized education in Greek and Roman times and was seen as a necessary compo-nent of democratic citizenship. The study of rhetoric focused on argument as an oral practice of making clear

So, what does it really mean to do research? Research is a three-stage process: (1) seeking information that is new to the researcher, (2) interpreting, evaluating, and organizing that information, and (3) reporting that information to others to affect some action. Richard Larson emphasizes that the nature of research is active. The researcher—whether student, academic, or professional—takes an active role in seeking. Seeking is not limited to locating what exists, but also extends to creating new data or information in service of answering a question or solving a problem.

The research paper has become a rite of passage where students choose a topic (or are assigned one) about which they present a claim, and then look for ways to confirm it with evidence located through some ambiguous thing or process called research. One of the primary problems with the research paper is that it teaches students that to do research is to look things up—to use the library or the Internet. Skills for locating information are essential to being a successful researcher, as is familiarity with the library and the rich variety of sources available, but it represents only a small part of the research process.

Unfortunately, the labor involved in researching and using the Internet for research tends to be ignored. Instructors may underestimate the nuances of popular databases and overesti-mate students’ frequent use of databases as competency. However, Internet research really is a lot of work. Researching “the research paper” via Google, Google News, and Google Scholar retrieves almost 19,000,000 results. Unaccompanied by quotes, the number of results exceeds one billion. Without awareness of the impor-tance of Boolean logic, or operators that affect the scale of results, a researcher may find herself drowning in data. When plugged into proprietary databases available to most college and university students such as Proquest, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, and Academic Search Complete, the research paper displays several thousands of sources per database.

Typically, a first-year college student’s research paper assign-ment might require 5–10 sources, whereas advanced students are probably asked to cite no more than 30 sources. These figures may stem from research concerns that emerged during an entirely different technological history

To understand the research paper and its contemporary signif-icance, we must acknowledge how the Internet makes the process of research and of writing research much more complex. A vast majority of Internet users use the web and social media multi-ple times per day. Long gone are the days when one major func-tion of the research paper was to bring students into contact with libraries. Today’s students need to also know how to navigate the Internet—a vast digital source of information whose system archi-tecture affects the work of teaching and research.

The five-paragraph essay (5PE) doesn’t have many vocal defenders in Departments of English in higher education, but for some instructors, the 5PE remains a useful tool in the pedagogi-cal kit. Most college writing instructors have eschewed the 5PE, contending that it limits what writing can be, constricts writers’ roles, and even arbitrarily shapes writers’ thoughts. Yet, defenders of the 5PE counter that beginning writers need the guidance and structure that it affords. It works, they say, and it gives writers a place from which to start.

The 5PE may sound familiar. In its most basic form, it is an introduction, three points, and a conclusion. Students are often given a topic to discuss, a passage to respond to, or a question to answer.

Here is the thing, though: When writers (and critics) talk about the 5PE, they’re not really talking about five paragraphs any more than critics or proponents of fast-food restaurants are talking about McDonald’s. Most defenders of the 5PE will either explic-itly or implicitly see the sentence, the paragraph, and the essay as reflections of each other. Just as an essay has a thesis, a paragraph has a topic sentence; just as a paper has evidence to support it, a paragraph has detail.

One sphere of writing is marked off as creative while others are de-valued.

The problem is that one image of writing dominates the popu-lar imagination and is weighted with value more heavily than all others: creative writing, which is treated as if it’s interchangeable with fiction and poetry. Over the years, I’ve come to understand a few pervasive problems that stem from the view of creativity as tied to fiction and poetry, from the public’s lack of awareness of what academics and other workplace writers do, from problematic attitudes held within the so-called field of creative writing itself

To many, if not most, the phrase creative writing marks a genre. It’s as simple as breakfast. A man writes in a garret, his pages lit by the faint glow of a lamp. Ideas are spilling madly from his cerebral cortex to the page. He probably has a cup of coffee next to him. Or a dog. And he is writing a story—perhaps about a road trip.

Mostly they keep silent on the topic of teaching humorous yet legitimately academic, persuasive writ-ing, and let the Western tradition’s tendency to privilege tragedy carry the big stick.

But those who think academic writing must exclude the come-dic are serious. (And a writing teacher should NOT call them Shirley. That is, not if that teacher wants to keep her job.)

Surely, you can’t be serious! After all, very smart people have been slaying ignorance while slaying audiences by delivering intel-ligent ideas with comedy’s passion, edge, urgency, and punch for quite some time: Samantha Bee. John Oliver. Key and Peele.

Effective revising isn’t making changes for the sake of change, but instead making smarter changes.

BreidenbachThe fantasy that good writers summon forth beautiful, lean, yet intricate sentences onto a page without sweating is an unhealthy fiction, and it is wrong.

The standard perception that revision is something that happens at the end of the writing process is a good place to start revising ideas about revision.”

Many people bemoan the large amount of packaging that supermarkets use, particularly for fruit and vegetables, most of which have their own natural protection. Nonetheless, a major reason that supermarkets use so much packaging is to protect food and prevent waste—particularly with fresh food. Removing plastic entirely from our food supply may not be the best solution when it comes to protecting the environment and conserving valuable resources.

Simply removing plastic from food packaging is not as sustainable as one might think. There are lots of cases where plastic packaging can be beneficial at reducing waste. But food sellers need to think of ways to reduce and reuse the plastic where possible.

More than 50% of food waste takes place in households and nearly 20% is wasted during processing. Plastic packaging may be a necessary evil to reduce this high level of waste in both areas. A number of factors must be taken into account when determining how useful plastic packaging is in the food supply chain, as it has the potential to preserve food and prevent its wastage

This week a new report will be released on behalf of Champions 12.3 – a group of public and private sector leaders who have made a commitment to help halve global food waste per capita by 2030, in line with Target 12.3 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It sets out the economic arguments for reducing food waste.

In other words, reducing waste offers real business opportunities. So, we need to put food waste on the boardroom agenda. CEOs rely on hard numbers. Until now, there hasn’t been a clear set of data and financial analysis that business leaders can point to on food waste. Our ambition with this report is to change that and make sure food waste gets the focus from business that it deserves.

Imagine a land mass greater than China. Now imagine that land is only used to produce food. Then suppose all the crops and produce from those 2.5 billion acres are not eaten. Imagine all of that – and you have grasped the amount of food the world wastes every year.

Every year a third of the world’s food is wasted. In terms of weight, it adds up to around 1.3bn tonnes. In the UK alone, we waste over 10m tonnes of food in a year.

Numerous writing studies scholars have documented how attitudes toward students, learning, and writing itself have influenced writing instruction.

As teachers understandably grew fearful about losing their jobs because of low test scores, they devoted class time to preparing students for the tests rather than developing prac-tices that would have helped students improve as readers and writ-ers. Standardized tests often rely on multiple-choice responses that neither allow for complexity of thought nor invite students to draw connections between the text under consideration and their own experiences.

This often manifests itself in teaching only surface-level reading strategies in K–12 such as skimming and reading for the gist, and in cries of, “They should know this stuff before they get here!” at the university level.