When I was in school, I found these three great for academic research. They might be useful for areas outside of academia, though. Purdue Online Writing Lab - https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html EBSCOhost - https://www.ebsco.com/products/ebscohost-platform (your local library may offer free access to this) ProQuest - https://www.proquest.com/ (your local library may offer free access to this) I worked for the Alabama Department of Archives and History as a stock clerk. I retrieved and returned archival documents patrons requested to view. Your state archives can be a valuable resource for old newspapers, magazines, photos, legal documents, geneology; a truly incredible amount of information a writer might need for accuracy, even in ficiton.
Internet search can be a wonderful thing if used right. It makes subjects hard to grasp easy in minutes, even Wikpedia (which you don't use as a primary source obviously).
i can see your point and i understand why you say it, i am an expert in an area and find it very hard to have a conversation with others about that topic when i know the answers are in the forum and can easily be found here as a writer i am lower than a novice, i dont know what to ask for as i dont understand what to say and where to look. I have to ask dumb questions because i am dumb and i will stay that way unless someone tells me or teachs me or trains me to look in the right area So sorry, but after looking i will keep asking dumb questions
Hi! I need some help regarding my research website, I'm new to this and i want to represent factually accurate statistics and trends. What would be the best type of representation template. Thankyou
In my experience, facts are generally best represented by text, so any template would be essentially a report template. Statistics to me means numbers, and IMHO numbers are generally best represted by graphs. Fire up Excel (or the Mac equivalent thereof) and choose what type of graph rings your chimes. If you want to be honest in your presentation, don't skew the graph(s) by cheating on the origin. (You can make the difference between 73% and 75% look HUGE if you cut the bottom of the graph off at 70% and the top at 80%. But doing that is a lie.)
I spent an hour today looking up information in the US census for 1900. I wanted 1910, but it wasn't available for the particular area I was researching.
No, it hasn't been transcribed. Searching out and going over photographs of the original handwritten pages would be interesting, but the point of diminishing returns would be rapidly reached. I went with what I had and eventually found the information I needed elsewhere. It proved my original conjecture, so I was pleased with my smarty boots self. I'm several years too late for the atlatl question above. Too bad. I've used them and am crushed to not be able to expound on an esoteric subject with someone who gives a rip.
I want to hire someone to do the research for me. I have 57 books to read for research on my new script and dread the thought of it. Where would I go on the forum to find the people who would do the research for me? Please advise.
You don't. Speaking as a moderator, this forum isnt a critique service or research factory. This is a community of writers who help each other to improve their craft. This includes critiquing original work, asking writing related questions, and pointing each other in the general direction of possible research. But one thing we do NOT do is write and research things for you. We are willing to help but you have to do your own work around here.
Try hiring starving graduate students at nearby universities to do research if you're dead set against doing it yourself, but my experience is no one can find a writer exactly the information the writer wants better than the writer.
Why the heck do you need to read 57 books anyway... make a better list of what you really need to know and narrow your research down
Fifty-seven books seems a little light to me, but some of us are more compulsive researchers than others. Of course, I don't read every word of every book I consult: indexes, abstracts, and tables of contents are invaluable.
I think @Cogito mentioned personal visits to subject matter experts such as the police. Well I do like this method for locally researched things, I find a good email often suffices, especially during the recent unpleasantness where in person was not an option. I have been surprised at how many experts with alphabet titles will respond to little unknown me and the best part is most subject matter experts have public emails. I do however have some tips/rules I follow. 1. Let them know you are an author, aspiring or otherwise, right up front. It usually breaks the ice differently than if you were some random dude wanting to know about consolations or atomic energy. Usually they are pleased that you want your book to accurately represent their profession, especially if it ever gets published. 2. Be patient. Remember that any information they dispense to you is from the goodness of their hearts and they might be on an archeological field trip, teaching and grading papers, or enjoying down time between busy seasons with their family. There are a few times I had almost forgot I had sent them an email 3-6 months previous and suddenly got a reply. Do not spam anyone in hopes to get a reply: you might as well not ask at all. 3. Fitting in with number 2, do not ask more than 3 questions at a time and make them as concise as possible. No one is going to give you all the scenarios of an explosion in Yellowstone and what debris will cover the United States. They are not going to write you scientific papers. instead ask something like : "My MC worked in Cheyanne Mountain in Colorado and survived the initial eruption of Yellowstone. When she emerges a year after the blast, how contaminated do you believe the air is and what contaminates would be in the water?". It is a multi-part question with the location of the Colorado Springs area in Colorado, a year post-eruption and the present contaminates. Its an intriguing question that will make them think for a minute and give you a creative answer. Sometimes I have gotten a lot more information than I asked, just because they were drawn into my question. 4. Last but not least, be professional, courteous, and always, always, always say thank you. No one wants to be treated like a human version of Google. I still have a couple people who email me randomly asking how my book is coming. Don't burn a bridge when a reply email with "Dr, Doofenshmirtz, thank you so much for explaining your latest -inator to me, your help was invaluable." would have kept them as a future source of information.
Resurrected this thread to mention two more great sources of research material: Amazon Unlimited and Amazon Music. Each is 9.99 a month, and Unlimited offers free-to-read books on pretty much any subject you're likely to think of. Amazon Music offers (by Amazon's count) over 100,000 podcasts on a amazing variety of subjects. Just the ad-free category includes a podcast about Ben Franklin as a boy, one from Slate that focuses on a single year in history each episode, and a hockey podcast called Spittin' Chiclets.
I just had to link this. Anyway, yeah. Google's not that great if you want deeper information. I prefer human interaction and double checking those facts.
This sticky has missed off the most important type of research: living It's a particular problem for fantasy and sci-fi, when people write about adventures specifically because they haven't had any
Isn't saying that people who write fantasy and sci-fi haven't had adventures a bit of a generalization? Tolkien, you could say had a bit of an adventure, if one can call war that. And there are warrior-writers out there. Or people who have had other kinds of adventures, who write. Sure, a sci-fi writer has probably not traveled the stars, but they may have traveled harsh enviroments or had adventures here on Earth. I agree that living is an important piece of research.
It wasn't a generalization. "When" here introduces a conditional clause, similar to an "if." E.g.:- People break their necks when they fall down the stairs It's a problem for sci fi when people write about adventures because they haven't had any OED: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.271838/page/n695/mode/2up (bottom of the middle column) has this as "Indefinite or General" The difference from an "if" is that the speaker additionally asserts that the condition is sometimes fulfilled: like adding (and sometimes they do) or (and often they do) How I think it works is that Tolkien interposes his storyworld between his direct experience of WW1 and the reader. The fantasy-trappings don't just soften the impact on the reader - they also capture some eternal qualities of the experience - the (fantastic) Battle of Helm's Deep is both a secondary impression of Tolkien's (real-life) assault on e.g. the Schwaben Redoubt, and an attempt to extrapolate universal truths from it. As one simple feature of this: the Battle of Helm's Deep can be told to a child, in a way that we don't read a child first-hand accounts of gas attacks. I believe LotR is part of how English literature has processed the experience of WW1. It's a complicated subject, but I don't think a non-soldier could have written LotR usefully. A non-soldier can write fantasy battles - but they won't be communicating their experiences of war, it must be that their fantasy battles work out other types of conflict. We should be open to someone's fantasy battle about their divorce being able to be as moving as Helm's Deep about WW1. And of course the only person who could attempt to nail down precisely what inspired Helm's Deep is Tolkien - he wouldn't necessarily be correct about himself, and if he was he wouldn't necessarily tell the truth about it. The parts of writers that handle the deepest foundations of storytelling are mysterious and somewhat closed off from (i) the experiences (ii) any other research (iii) outside analysis. Well that is a way of looking at it - I hope it's a sufficiently familiar one from expert history-of-literature, certainly I've not done it justice.
