The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write:
a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2
This has been a very interesting week. The weather has been all over the show thankfully - as the sun gets warmer and I get increasingly closer to school holidays, my motivation to read wanes. So with such crazy, rainy days I've been able to put in some solid hours towards completing the first assignment for this course. Despite the rain, I can see that full summer is just around the corner as a flash of red is creeping into the many Pohutukawa that dot our Bay of Plenty coastline.
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| Pohutukawa, Tauranga |
So I started with some for and against arguments I knew existed, not necessarily my own, but some that were commonly touted around this issue. These arguments came without too much trouble...make the industry organisations accountable, increased penalties for failure to abide, government-subsidised alternative fertilisers and on and on.
The problems started when I started investigating further. I went to the net and conducted a basic search on Google which generated many, many, many, many articles, reports, news clips, documentaries and so on. There was so much interesting information but it all started to get a bit much and I found my own views being challenged with each click of mouse. I was also very aware that a lot of the search returns were examples of 'popular literature' and it was really important for me to go back to the lessons taught in this week's classes about some of the issues with using these as research material - it may be biased or sensationalised, the author may lack scientific credentials and so on.
Still, as I sifted through these returns I did find some links to scholarly texts, through using Google Scholar. Unfortunately some journals were not accessible online and often they only allowed you to view the abstract. I have accessed journals through the distance library for previous papers and have found them really useful, if only less accessible in terms of content and form than their popular counterparts. While these are considered to be more valid and reliable than the magazine, web or newspaper articles, I still needed to consider the source, authority, audience, content and currency of the journal. I used this same process for the books I had ordered from the Massey Library. I found this secondary literature too broad and often dated, as there have been many recent changes to legislation and regulation around this issue of late.
While I continued to gather more information, I saw a shift in the way I was approaching the paper. Rather than looking for the existing arguments, I started looking for reliable evidence, from which to form my own arguments. This may seem obvious to the rest of you but it took me awhile to get there! I can relate to what Johnson said about the need to read 'half a library' but you really need such scope to put across informed ideas.
Alas, while I most likely won't have the full draft finished with a week to go like my team mate (go Meg!), I feel like I'm making some good progress. Thank you Liz for the Dr Mike Joy link - I listened to his talks for my last paper and crazily haven't even used his research for this position paper yet. On that note, I'm going to sit down with a cuppa and watch his talk right now. In case you're interested I've included the link here.
