using the web

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Using the web when writing essays:

Use the net to:

-give yourself a wider sense of the area you intend to cover

-check whether a source you found is popular

-find secondary material that will help you understand something

-find a resource not located elsewhere

-look up a style guide such as the Purdue University Online Writing Lab guide.

Do not use the net to:

-find summaries to save you from having to do the readings

-find essays to copy

-find a quote from something you could easily find in the library

How to reference from the net:

Treat a website the way you would a book. Ideally you should have the author,  title and location of page. Most of this information can usually be found (see below). Citing no more than the URL is not good enough: it is the equivalent of quoting from a book and only citing the Dewey decimal call number on its spine!

You must also put the date when you accessed it.

How do you know if you are using the best source?

First look at context. What sort of website is it? If it is not an academic website and you are using it for general academic purposes it is probably not up to weight.

Who wrote the article? Was it a professor, expert, or a casual user? How do you know whether they know what they are talking about?

Also check to see if the website is approaching your topic from a very different field or angle, as this may confuse you. Even across our own website, you may see different uses of material in different papers.

Choose a key sentence and google it, as it may be reproduced in more detail elsewhere. This is especially useful for unattributed quotes.

If the page contains a quote from a book, copy the name of the book and search for it in the library Voyager catalogue. The book is the best source!

 

What to do when the info about the page is missing:

First check the title bar at the top of your browser and the status bar at the bottom. These may give you the title of the page.

Often you can find more information by choosing view/source from your browser menu. This will open a plain text document containing all the html code used to create the page. Somewhere near the top of this html code the author has probably written details.

As has been noted above, running a web search on the title or a sentence or two will sometimes yield a better page with more details on it.

Finally, try to view the parent directory as it could contain a menu (delete part of the url. eg  if you take www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/ftvm/ and delete the /ftvm/ you will find yourself at the index page of the host directory, the Faculty of Arts)