Find the suitable heading for each paragraph. There is one extra topic.

1. Primary features of academic sources
2. The category of sources
3. The types of information sources
4. Historical documents
5. Distinction between the information sources
6. The identification of academic sources

Information search

(1)The sources of information you can document in university assignments are typically those from an authority. In an academic setting, an authority is usually someone who has been the author of published material. This material may come in the form of books, journal articles, published reports.

(2)This kind of information is useful in that it provides evidence, which may be in the form of – theoretical ideas, critical evaluations, research findings, and scholarly opinions - to back up the points you are making. Sometimes, these sources can be grouped into two categories: primary and secondary sources.

(3)Primary sources relate to publicly available data, like historical documents, rawdata from an experiment, or demographic records. Secondary sources draw on these primary sources of data, but have been produced for public consumption in the form of a journal article or a chapter in an edited book. You are more likely to use secondary sources in your assignments. Secondary sources differ from secondary citations, which occur when you use a reference that was cited in another source and not the original. Secondary citations are dealt with in a later section.

Academic sources of information, or evidence, differ from……

• Your own opinions.

• Conclusions or outcomes of discussions on the issue with friends or relatives.

• A celebrity’s opinion.

• Articles in popular magazines.

• Opinion columns in newspapers.

(4) You can certainly draw on these materials for ideas to be developed in your assignment, but do not use them as sources of evidence. Having identified acceptable academic sources, consider how to integrate these sources into your writing.

(5) One of the primary features of academic writing is using the literature to support your ideas. This requires you to read widely in order to seek out the different sides of a debate within a particular field of inquiry. In a sense, university assignments can be considered as vehicles for exploring the literature and finding out points of difference, agreement, and variability amongst different authors. What this means is that you need to demonstrate evidence of your literature exploration by including these authors in your writing and mentioning their points of view. This technique of referring to authors in your writing is often termed citing, documenting, or in-text referencing.

Task 2

Answer the questions in groups of three.

1. Who is the authority?
2. What are the different forms of evidence?
3. What is the translation of the phrase «raw data»?
4. What is the difference between primary sources and secondary sources?
5. What is the difference between secondary sources and secondary citations?
6. What sort of technique is in-teхt referencing?
7. What is the synonym for the word «academic» in the text?

Task 3

Discuss in groups of four.

1. Who is the authority for you?
2. Do you read any opinion column?
3. What is «academic writing» in terms of your university career?
4. What university assignments you had during your Bachelor studies?
5. What assignments were the most difficult for you to complete?

Task 4.