Research Tips for Your Family, Business, or Personal Pursuits
Research doesn't have to mean looking through microscopes in laboratories for science projects or reading musty history tomes for term papers. Learn how to find the information you need — whether it's knowledge critical for your family's health, intelligence important for the success of your business, facts useful in making buying decisions, or simply lore you want to know. Discover how to evaluate the reliability of the data you gather as well.
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RESEARCH? WHO, ME?
What Research Is
Often when we think of research, we think of science labs or history papers. But most of us do some kind of research regularly—we may not call it research, but that's what we're doing any time we track down information. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary includes the following among several definitions of research:
n. "the collecting of information about a particular subject," and
v. "to search or investigate exhaustively ."
Sometimes—such as when we're trying to learn all we can about a loved one's frightening medical diagnosis—the research is serious and extensive.
Other times—such as when we're trying to remember a famous quote—the research is fun and easy.
Often it's somewhere between the two extremes.
Here are some examples of things you may research:
• Moving, home buying, or renting
• Home maintenance, repair, and decorating
• Comparison shopping, saving money, vacation planning
• Child development, family relationships
• Pet care, gardening, auto maintenance
• Recipes, special events planning, hobbies
• Medical conditions, medication side-effects and interactions
• Genealogy
• Homeschooling curriculum
• School projects
• Job openings, career development
• Toasts, farewell speeches, eulogies
• Quotes, song lyrics, poems, movie titles or characters
• Business management techniques
• Taxes, regulations, insurance
• Employee benefits
• Marketing strategies, competition
At last, a middle school version of Simple Steps to Sentence with all new practice exercises, tests, writing connection pages, and answers. Everything you need to teach your students the easy way to analyze sentences. Just print a page at a time, or
In his many novels, poetry, histories, editorials, plays, and letters, W. E. B. Du Bois poured so much of his blindingly incandescent soul into his writings that no single volume could ever contain all of his words or works. In fact, had not the his
