Finding Evidence

Summary

The video by Taylor Hill discusses methods and strategies for finding and citing evidence for a definition essay, specifically for students at GCU. Hill emphasizes the importance of using the GCU Library for research, advises against using full questions in search bars, and highlights the significance of keyword usage for efficient research. The discussion includes how to evaluate search results, avoid quoting from abstracts, and incorporate evidence with signal phrases and proper citations. The video stresses the relevance of using scholarly sources and provides guidance on effective citation techniques.

Highlights

• Use the GCU Library for research; don't type full questions like 'Is a hot dog a sandwich?' 🍔
• Focus search on peer-reviewed journal articles for quick, scholarly insights. 📚
• Instead of full questions, use keywords and focus on titles to find relevant articles quickly. 💡
• Read abstracts to determine the usefulness of an article for your essay. 👍
• Avoid quoting from abstracts, use the full article for precise citation.
• Explain the relevance of quotes in your argument to strengthen it. 💪
• Cite evidence properly using APA format to avoid academic dishonesty. 🧐

Key Takeaways

• 🔍 Use the GCU Library for finding evidence effectively. Avoid using full questions in searches to get relevant results.
• 📰 Focus on journal articles rather than books to save time.
• 👩‍⚖️ Use the keywords in your search to identify promising articles. Read the abstracts to determine relevance.
• 📋 Check the titles of articles to determine their potential usefulness for your argument.
• 🔗 When quoting, incorporate evidence using signal phrases and always explain the quote thoroughly to support your claim.
• ⚖️ Ensure you cite your sources correctly using APA format to maintain academic honesty and avoid plagiarism.

Overview

Taylor Hill's instructional video offers a thorough guide on how to efficiently gather and cite evidence for your definition essay using the GCU Library. Hill begins by emphasizing the importance of utilizing the library's resources, particularly journal articles over books due to their more manageable length and focused content. Using the search bar effectively is highlighted by Hill; instead of typing full questions, she advises using keywords to refine search results.

Throughout the video, Hill provides practical advice on evaluating journal article search results, such as reading titles and abstracts to assess relevance and usefulness of the material. She also covers the critical steps of incorporating quotes, highlighting the necessity of signal phrases, and going beyond just inserting a quote by fully explaining its relevance to your argument. This approach ensures your evidence supports and strengthens your essay's claims.

Lastly, Hill offers guidance on proper citation practices, focusing on avoiding common pitfalls such as quoting from abstracts and inaccuracies in automatically generated citations. By following her advice, students can confidently build a robust definition essay grounded in well-researched and correctly cited scholarly evidence.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Purpose The chapter titled 'Introduction and Purpose' provides assistance and resources for finding evidence for a definition essay, addressing a common struggle mentioned in discussions. The speaker offers a presentation with helpful hints to aid in research for the essay.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Using GCU Library for Research The chapter discusses the utilization of the GCU Library for conducting research. It provides instructions on accessing the library's resources by logging in with GCU credentials at library.gcu.edu. Once logged in, users will encounter several options represented by purple boxes, with a particular emphasis on the 'Find Journal Articles' section for sourcing research materials.
• 01:30 - 03:30: Search Tips and Techniques In this chapter, the focus is on effective search strategies, particularly in academic research. It emphasizes prioritizing journal articles over books when searching for information, as journal articles are typically quicker to read and access than entire books. The suggestion is to save time by consulting articles first, considering that longer sources like books require more time to extract useful evidence or information, which may not be practical for those with busy schedules or multiple commitments.
• 03:30 - 07:30: Evaluating and Selecting Sources The chapter focuses on evaluating and selecting sources, emphasizing the importance of using credible sources such as scholarly journals. The library website, particularly the Journal Articles section, is recommended as a starting point. It highlights the common mistake of typing full questions into search bars, using the example question 'Is a hot dog a sandwich?' as a scenario to avoid.
• 07:30 - 13:30: Incorporating and Explaining Evidence The chapter titled 'Incorporating and Explaining Evidence' discusses the differences in using search engines on library databases compared to more general search engines like Google. The key advice given is to avoid typing whole questions into the search bar when using library databases. Instead, one should use more targeted search terms, especially when tasked with finding academic or scholarly sources for class assignments.
• 13:30 - 18:30: Citation and References in APA Style This chapter focuses on the importance of using peer-reviewed academic scholarly sources when writing an academic paper, particularly when such sources are required. It stresses the necessity of checking the peer-reviewed box when searching for sources to ensure the results are appropriate for academic use. The chapter hints at common issues encountered when inputting entire questions into search boxes, although it does not provide specific details about the nature of these issues.
• 18:30 - 19:30: Concluding Tips and Resources This chapter emphasizes the importance of selecting relevant sources that align with the topic of your definition essay. It warns against using unrelated articles that may appear in initial searches, as they can detract from your argument. Instead, the chapter advises to avoid 'shoehorning' quotes that do not genuinely support your paper's criteria or claim.

Finding Evidence Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hi everyone today I wanted to provide um a little bit of assistance and extra resource for finding evidence for our definition essay um I know that in our first discussion board a lot of people mentioned that this is something that they struggle with a little bit so I just wanted to provide a really quick um sort of helpful hints um presentation for you guys so um the first thing that we want to highlight when we talk about um doing research for this essay is that
• 00:30 - 01:00 you want to be using the GCU Library um which is just Library gcu.edu um this is where we want to find most of our research so um we want to go to this website you want to be logged in um to the website using your GCU credentials um and we want to when we when we get it pulled up there will be several purple boxes um we will likely want to use fine Journal articles here um you can look
• 01:00 - 01:30 for books and things like that um but that might be a little bit more difficult as most of those things are going to be um a little bit longer um and so it might take you more time if you're using the find books section might take you more time to read through your sources and find um evidence that you want to use so my recommendation would be to go for Journal articles first because it's going to be a little bit quicker for you to read through those um and I know that we all have you know other things going on in our lives and so I don't want you guys to spend too much time reading entire books to
• 01:30 - 02:00 get your sources um so again that's library. gcu.edu that's where you're going to want to start off so once you click the find Journal article so when you um click that find Journal articles box you're going to be presented with a search bar um so the thing you want to avoid when you know being presented with the search bar is typing entire questions into the into the search bar um so if we think about our example which was is a hot dog a sandwich I don't want to Simply type that that
• 02:00 - 02:30 whole question into the search bar um that is not going to get the most helpful results for us um because the the way that the search engine works on the library database like this or any Library database is it does not lend itself to um full questions like this it's not the same as Google it works differently so you want to avoid using entire questions and when you are using the search bar if you are writing for a class that requires you to have academic or scholarly sources you want to make
• 02:30 - 03:00 sure you check that peer reviewed box um that is an academic scholarly source so be sure if that is what is required for the paper that you are writing which it is required for this paper that you're checking that PE viewed box so that all of the the results you're getting you can use for your essay if they do end up being helpful so what what's the issue um with the results that we get when we type a whole question into the box the issue is that these results are
• 03:00 - 03:30 unrelated to our topic um so they had one about food insecurity one about kiche um those things are not really related to our definition essay nor to our criteria nor to our claim um none of those things are going to be super helpful for us so we want to avoid using articles that come up on our first initial search if they're not related to our topic so it might be easiest to just click on one of those and try and find a quote we might be able to shoehorn into our paper but if we do that and we use
• 03:30 - 04:00 evidence that does not relate to our argument on a large scale or to our paragraph itself it's going to weaken our claim and it's going to weaken our essay so we want to avoid just you know trying to find whatever evidence we can that can maybe sort of kind of fit um because it's going to ultimately hurt us in the long run so instead what we want to do is try using keywords so in this um example instead of typing is a hot dog a sandwich I just very simply typed
• 04:00 - 04:30 in Sandwich definition those are key words that I'm interested in um and while I was looking through the results I found a result that is titled is a burrito a sandwich um so even with a more solid search as you can see that is a burrito a sandwich was a number eight result um you might have to scroll for a little bit before you find a relevant Source but um that is a burrito s is is a burrito a sandwich article is promising right um it's related to what we're trying to do in our paper right CU
• 04:30 - 05:00 we're also looking at what makes something a sandwich so the title is your first clue into seeing if an article might be helpful for you so when you're scrolling through the results the first thing that you want to do is is be looking at the titles so you're looking at the titles as you scroll through um for ones that seem like they might help you out so you want to be thinking really clearly about what sort of evidence do I need for this paragraph um what am I looking for am I looking for evidence that supports a criteria am I looking for evidence that supports my
• 05:00 - 05:30 matching paragraph what do I need and when I'm looking at the article titles that's what I have going through my head so if I know that I'm looking for help with my criteria for example and I see an article titled is a burrito a sandwich I'm going to maybe be interested in checking that out a little bit further so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click the title of it and it's going to pull up the abstract so I want to read through the entire abstract in order to see um if there is something that might be helpful in in that paper
• 05:30 - 06:00 or that article for me so after reading the abstract I can determine if it's going to be helpful for finding evidence um based on that abstract in the previous slide I do think that the paper will be helpful and the reason for that is because the abstract mentions that a judge um provided a definition of a sandwich in a legal court case so automatically I have um someone of authority right which is a judge in a position of authority which is a legal courtroom defining sandwich um so if one
• 06:00 - 06:30 or more of the judges criteria are the same or aligned with my criteria that I'm using that would be really helpful to strengthen my argument right um so I I definitely want to look into this article a little bit further to see if there is a is a piece of evidence within the article I can use so now that I have you know gone through this process I want to click PDF full text on the left hand side in order to pull up the entire ire article you do not want to quote
• 06:30 - 07:00 from the abstract so if you see something in the abstract that you're like wow that's a really helpful piece of evidence I really want to put that in my article click on the article and find it in the paper if it is in the abstract it will be in the article itself um you cannot quote the abstract when you are quoting um from an article you need to quote the article itself so you need to actually know the page number that it is on um and the context of what the author is saying around it things like that so you definitely want to um avoid quoting
• 07:00 - 07:30 from the abstract because it's going to mess up your Intex citations and everything like that so I'm going to click PDF full text on this is a burrito a sandwich article and see if there's something that will be helpful for me when I pull it up um it's important to note that I don't have to read every single word of the article right some of these articles are really long 70 Pages or more in some cases um 40 50 you know it they get a little bit lengthy I don't want you to think you have to to read every single word of every single
• 07:30 - 08:00 article um you can skim through introductions a lot of the time some sections might have uh some articles might have sections called like methods or methodology if if those are there you can usually skim those they're not going to be providing you a lot of um evidence for what you're trying to do um so you want to be sure that you're picking a quote that clearly and directly relates to what you're are writing about so you don't just want to pick any quote from this article and put it in your paper and assume that that's going to work um
• 08:00 - 08:30 that's not it's not going to be helpful it needs to clearly and directly relate to what you're writing about so that you have an Avenue to prove that it is backing up your claim right so while I'm skimming through this article that I found I skim through the introduction and I'm I'm on the definitions section of her article um I see this highlighted quote here um the court then applied common sense and one dictionary definition of the word sandwich two thin
• 08:30 - 09:00 pieces of bread usually buttered with a thin layer spread between them okay my first criteria is that it is between two sides of bread a sandwich is between two sides of bread so this here that relates to my first criteria right the court found that you know two thin pieces of bread is is integral to the definition of sandwich so I think that this quote clearly and directly relates to my first criteria for sandwiches so I'm going to choose to use
• 09:00 - 09:30 this quote in my essay so once I choose this quote I need to incorporate it right um I I want to avoid just placing the evidence in my paragraph Just plopping it in there and assuming it'll work for itself it'll make sense everyone will know why I put it in there everything like that um I don't want to do that right I want to incorporate this evidence to work best for me so the evidence ultimately is to help you strengthen your claim right um so I want to do the work that I need to do to make sure my evidence is helping me the best
• 09:30 - 10:00 that it possibly can so to do that I want to use a signal phrase to introduce my quote so I'm not just going to put a quote in between two sentences I'm going to introduce it first and then I want to fully explain how that quote relates to the position I'm making and the claim that I'm addressing in my in my specific paragraph so for example um we might say something like in a court case concerned with outlining the definition of Sandwich one judge stated this is our signal phrase I'm introducing you to the
• 10:00 - 10:30 idea that I'm going to now cite a source I have set up who is saying this and um where they're saying it right so I'm saying that this is a court case and a judge said this so I've provided context for my reader about why this quote that I'm about to present is important why it's useful and why it has weight right a judge in a court case that has weight that's going to back me up so the judge stated that a sandwich is defined as having two thin pieces of bread um um so
• 10:30 - 11:00 I think it's important to note that we do not have to use that whole entire quote right that whole entire quote was several words longer than what I selected here we can bring attention to the piece of the quote we want to highlight right so I don't need um all of the intro about how it was a dictionary definition that the court was referring to and that it also included a thin um something thinly spread in between the two slices of bread right all of that is helpful but it's not what
• 11:00 - 11:30 I need for for my purposes right for my evidence my evidence is showing that a court judge decided legally that a sandwich needs two Thin slices of bread because that's my criteria so I am drawing attention to that part of the evidence in general you want to avoid using quotes that are longer than a sentence and I would say that usually even a sentence is a little bit too long the longer a quote is the more work you have to do to fully explain it right and
• 11:30 - 12:00 that's something that's really important that you want to make sure you're doing with all of your evidence that you are fully explaining why it relates to your point so if I have a sentence that's you know 15 words long it's going to take me double or triple that amount of words to explain why that quote is important so really make sure you're highlighting the most important pieces of your evidence you don't want it to just be one or two words right that's generally not going to be helpful um you want it to be long enough that you are showing that this is actually a source that you read and that you you think helps you um just using
• 12:00 - 12:30 one or two words it sort of can be anything right um but you don't want it to be too long so you have to find a balance there um and once we have introduced our quote with a signal phrase and then quoted with a citation our evidence we then want to explain that quote so immediately following the quote we want to do the work to explain what that quote means we don't want to do it you know two three four sentences down the line because that is our our audience is not going to connect that
• 12:30 - 13:00 right they're going to be like oh well we already we already moved past that quote so you want to have it immediately after your quote you want to explain it so an example for our um example scenario could be this definition was used in a court of law to determine the outcome of a legal case which makes it a clear example of how a sandwich is defined based on the judge's ruling it is evident that a sandwich must always be between two sides of bread so here I explain um um where this definition was
• 13:00 - 13:30 used again I highlight the idea that it was a court of law and that it was used to determine the outcome of a legal case these are very important things right um they're not trivial it's very important if you have a case that is going to court um and something is legally decided and I explain that when I say it makes it a clear example of how a sandwich is defined right so I'm doing the work to explain why my quote and my evidence is really helping out my claim um so and again this is two sentences I have to explain my quote which is I
• 13:30 - 14:00 think about five words long so that goes back to what I was saying in the sense that um the length of your quote you need to do double triple or more of that work to explain it so you want to avoid using quotes that are a sentence long two sentences long three sentences long which is something that I do see in papers um and it does not help your your argument um because you don't have the space in your paper to fully explain a quote of that link so just be sure that
• 14:00 - 14:30 you're finding a good balance of length of your quotes and that you are fully explaining um your quote and how it relates to your position so we want to make sure that we're citing our evidence so as you saw in that previous slide I did um cite my Intex citation that I used and I used APA to do that that's what we're using for this paper um so you always want to cite a direct quote with an inex citation so if you take the exact words from the publication and you put it in quotation marks that is a direct quote and you want to immediately
• 14:30 - 15:00 immediately have an Intex citation after that um this is in order to avoid academic dishonesty you want to be sure you're always always citing where you got your words um if you took them from someone else right so the general rules for an Intex citation are in the parentheses you have the author's last name comma space the year it was published comma space and then a page or paragraph number um so in our example we had author's last name name 2008 page 5
• 15:00 - 15:30 for the pages you use per period for the paragraph you use p a r a period um you're only going to use a paragraph number if there are no page numbers available um so if there are page numbers use those you only want to use paragraph number if the publication has zero page numbers on it um and it's also important to note that the punctuation always comes after the citation so in the previous slide um my Cit was the end of my sentence right so bread was the
• 15:30 - 16:00 last word of my sentence but I did not put the period after the word bread instead I closed my quotations I put my citation and I put the period after that that's how it's always going to be the punctuation is always going to come after your inext citation um I put the format for reference entries for Journal articles here as well um we I will try and provide maybe an APA focused um resource if you guys think that that would be helpful I can put something
• 16:00 - 16:30 together like that um but this is the the general idea sort of like I did with the Intex citation where you can sort of plug in the pieces from yours and use this example um I think it's important to note that you should avoid using websites that create citations for you like citation machine for example um they're often wrong so they often do not produce a correct reference reference entry for you um so you will lose points
• 16:30 - 17:00 if you have incorrect reference entries and a lot of times these websites are wrong so it's going to be better for you if you sort of use a plug-in chug method using the breakdown um that I have here um and again I I'll I'll provide a more APA focused resource if you guys think that would be helpful um but you can also find APA help on Purdue Owl I put a link here um they basically do exactly
• 17:00 - 17:30 what I have here they put where you need to have every single piece and they provide examples it's a really really helpful resource for you that um teaches you to do APA citations on your own without relying on a website to do it for you since those websites are often wrong um I use the website all of the time I would definitely recommend it um so I put the link for you there um it's very helpful in showing you how you need to sort of put in all of the pieces of
• 17:30 - 18:00 your article that you're using into a reference entry so having said all that um it's just important to remember that this assignment requires at least five scholarly sources um so one helpful way to think about that I know it sort of sounds like a high number um think about finding one source for each of your body paragraphs right so you have your first criteria body paragraph your second criteria body paragraph your third criteria body paragraph your criteria matching paragraph and your concession and reputation paragraph that's five
• 18:00 - 18:30 body paragraphs um if you think about okay I need to have one quote in each of my body paragraphs that's five done um and that's the minimum that you need you don't need any more than that and I think that that's sort of a helpful way to frame it so it also helps you when you're looking through the Articles to think about okay right now I'm looking for one quote to use for my criteria 2 paragraph or right now I'm looking for one quote to use for my concession and reputation paragraph um it sort of helps you to frame you're looking for so it's a little bit easier for you when you are
• 18:30 - 19:00 scrolling through those search results um so that was just a little brief overview um and hopefully helpful resource about finding evidence for your paper um if you guys have any questions do feel free to reach out to me I'm happy to help you out and like I said I will post some APA focused resources in the future if you guys think that that would be helpful