Young Rewired State

Education References

An essay help guide:

1. INTRODUCTION

Essays form an integral part of your history courses. They can also be one of the most rewarding aspects of a course, giving you a chance to research the raw material of history (primary sources) and to analyze other historians' interpretations of the past (secondary sources).

Essay writing is an opportunity to develop your research and writing skills. It is ultimately a lesson in communication. No matter how comprehensive your research or how brilliant your ideas, the essay will flounder if it is not well-organized and presented in clear and grammatically correct English. Obviously, good essay writing requires time. Buy Online Pay attention to deadlines and give yourself sufficient time to research, write and revise your essay.

The following guidelines are geared to the writing of History essays. Other helpful resources are listed in the last section.

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1. DEFINING THE TOPIC

In many classes, you will be given a list of essay topics from which to choose. It is wise to do some preliminary research to determine what topics really interest you and it is also advisable to clarify your chosen topic with your TA or instructor. If you are allowed to select your own topic or wish to substantially modify a given topic, be sure you have your topic approved by your TA or instructor.

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1. COMPILING A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Finding and researching appropriate and adequate sources for your essay will be a critical part of its success. No essay should be attempted on the basis of text books or one or two sources. In the John Robarts Library, you have access to one of the major research libraries in North America and there are other more specialized libraries on campus. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the U of T library system. All holdings can be searched on-line; knowing how to use UTCat (the on-line catalogue) is an essential research tool. It can also be helpful to do an actual shelf search; several hours spent browsing through library shelves on areas indicated in your first sources often lead to valuable discoveries.

In addition to books, don't neglect articles on your subject. Articles in periodicals are too often overlooked by students, although they may contain new approaches to and concise sources of information. Discuss research problems with librarians and do employ all available aids for use of the library system. Don't be afraid to ask for help.

Websites: These days students are often turning to rapidly-proliferating websites for sources for essays. Sometimes these can be helpful, especially if they are archival websites which can give you direct access to primary documents. However, websites should be used with caution. In some fields, websites can be the source of much inaccurate information and controversial and/or ill-founded opinion. If you want to use a website in your essay writing, you should adhere to the following procedure.

1. Get the approval of your instructor in advance for websites that you are planning to use.

2. Websites must be listed accurately in your bibliography and if you use material from them, it must be properly footnoted.

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1. RESEARCH TECHNIQUES

Research does not mean hunting for books, or just reading them. It means reading your sources with definite questions in mind. Essays should not be written from open books, but from notes made while reading sources. Orderly arrangement of these is imperative, including the author, title, and page number of the source. Whether you are taking notes by hand or by computer, be sure your are systematic and accurate.

There are a number of methods for organizing your notes. One traditional way is to use two different types of cards, "bibliography" (author-title) cards and "research" (subject-information) cards. Bibliography cards give relevant information about the sources used. They include the name of the author, the full title, and the location and date of the edition used. This card includes your evaluation of the usefulness of the source for your topic and relevant details about the author and his/her method. You will need this summation if you are asked to do an annotated bibliography.

Ideas of essay samples

Things to go here would be ideas you may have of *stuff* to do using the data sets we have listed on our debt help uk data page: http://rewiredstate.org/data or indeed any other data source you might have. (If you do have one, can you send a link to james@rewiredstate.org)

• Young Rewired State higher education hacks - a bunch of people on #rewiredstate IRC on 2009-08-14 are thinking about what we could do with data about universities and courses. Further info available here: http://groups.google.com/group/rs-hewg <-
• Free the Theory Test - the theory test question set is copyright the DVLA - it costs £6.99 to access the website for practice tests. Scrape or crowdsource the question data essay editing, and build a site for people to practise the test freely.
• Blog-o-tics - Created by bjwebb, binary and idde. This site was made to gauge the opinion of the blogosphere on the bills in parliament. The idea is to truly reflect public opinion and let MPs and Civil Servants know what the public thinks.
• AgeVerifier - The idea of Elliot Theis (@elliottheis). An OpenID like system hosted by the government that would be able to verify the person's name and their date of birth through government issued identification such as passports and drivers licenses that are currently available resume writers to stop underage people getting age restricted goods. The system would only report pass/fail of key data rather than exposing personal data.

Thoughts

Use this bit to write down things that you would like to resolve on the day. Either information that you would like to put together, problems you would like to see resolved, to brilliant new apps that would really help you with a free essays.

As mentioned, we can assist with travel and accommodation if it's needed. Contact us if we're behind on this.Earth4energy Fuel saving devices Jump Higher Phone

The fantastic DFEY group are doing a lot of self organising. See how they're doing at their wiki

If only we had the data

• TFHell - Need TfL live bus data to make it work. Currently using random generated data for proof-of-concept.