Developing Background Knowledge and Comparing Reports

When you are searching for a topic to write on, you can start by reading about subjects in newspapers and magazines written for the general public. It is best not to look for “breaking news,” “current events,” predictions, or opinion pieces (arguments). Rather, you should find a subject you want to explore and investigate. Reports of recent research can be a place to start. If you look at a recent New York Times science column (written by a journalist), you’ll see he begins with a discussion and an illustrations of horses, comparing their sizes.

Gorman, James. “Sifrhippus, the First Horse, Got Even Tinier as the Planet Heated Up.” New York Times Online. Feburary 23, 2012. Web. February 23, 2012.

If the topic of the evolution of horses interests you, you might do a Google search and go to a reader-friendly site at a natural history museum to get some background information. Here’s one:

MacPhee, Ross, and Sandra Olsen. "The Horse: May 17, 2008 -- January 4, 2009." American Museum of Natural History. Web. 23 Feb. 2012. .

Or using the researchers’ names and academic affiliations you would find in the Gorman article, you can use Google and find other information ranging from university press releases to the original research report in Science. You’ll find that you can get the government report and only the abstract of the Science article on the Web. But you should be able to access the entire article from Science online from Oakton. If you have enough knowledge of the field, you can try to read the research report with the help of a dictionary. . “Evolution of Earliest Horses Driven by Climate Change.” National Science Foundation. Web. February 23, 2012.

Secord, Ross et al. “Evolution of the Earliest Horses Driven by Climate Change in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.” Science 335.6071 (February 2012): 959-962. Web. February 24, 2012.

In looking at these pieces, you’ll see that they were written for different audiences. You might even check the ones written for a popular audience against the research report to see if those journalists and public relations writers are communicating the information accurately. Obviously, if you were using these sources in an essay, you would use the best one you could comfortably read and evaluate, and not all of them, since several repeat the same information. Remember to look for researchers’ names, even when reading newspaper or magazine articles that don’t have a list of references, since that information can lead you to other sources.