A highlighter allows you to go through a lot of printed information quickly and highlight those page numbers, titles, or chapter headings that you don't have time to read at that moment but that you might want to return. | LESSON 16 Revising Your Draft 77 LESSON 17 Proofreading and Editing Your Draft 81 LESSON 18 Adding Footnotes Endnotes and Parenthetical Citations 85 LESSON 19 Writing a Bibliography 95 LESSON 20 Writing an Annotated Bibliography a Historiography and an Abstract 99 POST-TEST 105 APPENDIX A A List of Research Topics 119 APPENDIX B Additional Resources 123 viii How to Use This Book This book is designed to help you improve your research skills in just 20 short lessons of 20 minutes a day by using basic research and writing tools that you can practice at home. Each lesson is carefully designed to make researching any topic and writing a research paper manageable and easy. Every lesson teaches different skills and if you do all the exercises you should be able to put together a research paper from start to finish in just a few short weeks. Although each lesson stands on its own it s important to follow the sequence. The lessons in this book are designed to take you through the initial phases of writing a research paper such as finding a topic locating and evaluating your sources framing your thesis question and writing your paper. Because each process is dependent on the others it is easier to follow the lessons sequentially so that your skills build on each other. To help you gauge how much you know about what kinds of materials are available to you and the best ways to locate those materials this book begins with a pre-test. This pre-test is important to take before you start Lesson 1 so that you have a beginning measure of your research knowledge. Then when you have finished Lesson 20 take the post-test to see just how much ix HOW TO USE THIS BOOK you ve learned about putting together a research paper from initial idea to polished finished draft. The most important thing you can do when you begin to research a topic and write a research paper is to have fun with your project Any topic that you choose to write about will become a fascinating learning experience. The .
