How To Research

As an ex-university teacher, a little advice for new university students writing essays.

You have to reference your sources. Wikipedia is great, but it isn’t acceptable as a reference. It’s also what a vast number of your colleagues just read. Easy way out: read a Wikipedia article for background, then skip to its reference section at the end. Read those articles and reference them if they’re useful. Read something else too. For the moment, anything printed on a dead tree carries more weight (figurative and literal) than work on the web.