You are going to be searching for THREE articles. These articles should focus on the causes or the effects (whichever the topic you chose for the Causal Analysis essay). The purpose of these articles is to provide evidence to support what you already argued for or about in your Essay.
Research: Using the Library Databases, find at least THREE articles. You don’t just want to pick the first three that appear, so you may choose to find more and then decide later which to use. The goal is to have a total of THREE. Remember, you need to pick reliable and credible sources. Sometimes even the library will have opinion pieces. You are looking for ACADEMIC articles.
*** Take a moment to analyze the articles you chose. Are they credible and reliable? Are they from academic journals? Do they end with a list of references or sources? ***
Keep in mind that simply searching for articles based on the topic is going to be far too vast. You are doing this to enrich what you already said, so search for ___ causes obesity or ___ is a positive effect of television. If your body paragraphs have strong topic sentences, then this is what you can search for, and you will have evidence to prove each of the points you made in your essay. If you are feeling stuck, think of other ways to say something similar (for example, “children raising children” is similar to “teenage pregnancy” and this will yield different results)
Draft: Scan some articles. Decide which three appeal to you – not based on length, but based on content (subject matter).
MLA Formatting Set up: Make sure your Summary document has the proper heading according to MLA standards, that you used Times New Roman and 12 point font, that your margins are 1 inch, and that you have double spaced, paginated, indented, and aligned correctly.
Summarize: You are now ready to summarize. When you summarize something, you should not have the item sitting next to you or open on the computer with you. Again, you are not consulting the source and writing a play-by-play account of everything in it. You are simply summarizing what you have read, so use the notes you took when reasing the article.
– The first sentence of your summary should identify the article title (use quotation marks) and author. Make sure this is a SENTENCE!
– Using the notes you jotted down, write the summary like a paragraph. It should be approximately three-fourths to one full page (approximately 12-15 sentences) summarizing what the article is about. If there was anything else you remembered that you wanted to include when you reread the article for a third time, try to insert it without referring back to the article.
– Remember, this is a summary; there should /not/ be direct quotes. Save those for your essay writing.
– Then do the same for the second article. Yes, right there on the same document, you will write a second paragraph summarizing the second article.
– Follow that one with the third article summary. Again, right there on the same document, you will write a third paragraph summarizing the third article.
Cite: Once you have completed your summary, you need to include the appropriate MLA citation for the articles you summarized on a Works Cited page. Again, look back on the previous lectures. This will be noted on a separate page of the same document. To do this:
– After you have typed your summary, click enter.
– Click “Insert” and then “Page Break”.
– Center align the words Works Cited.
– Click enter, then left align to begin typing the citations.
Remember, the citations go alphabetically according to the author’s last names. This might not be the order you wrote the summary paragraphs, and that’s okay! MLA 9 is the version you need to be using. You can use the citation provided from the library (Remember, these look a certain way, so these citations need to have the same italics, quotation marks, indents, period, everything as the one in the library).