Speaker 1: All right, so I want to segue from academic writing for a few videos, if it's okay with you guys, and I want to talk about academic writing's evil twin. Let's see if you can guess what it is, because this evil twin is something that I get asked about all the time. Matter of fact, it's one of the biggest struggles that comes with academic writing, but it's not necessarily academic writing itself. It is the process of researching. Now, how many of you can relate to feeling like you don't have a strategy when you research, or that researching takes up so much of your time and energy that when it comes to writing your papers, you almost have no energy left? So this is what I want to do for you, is take a few videos, make a mini series, and cover everything that I can give you to help make this process easier. Sound good? Let's do this. All right, so before I give you my best tips for effective research, I need to give you my spiel for what effective research is. And the reason is, is because none of us are really taught how to do effective research in college. I know I wasn't. There simply isn't a course that sits you down and says, hey, this is how you research. This is the best way to do it. This is what to look for. This is how you read an article. This is how you formulate it in your mind, unfortunately, but fortunately for you guys, that's where I come in. All right, so here's how I like to explain effective research. In matter of fact, effective research I'm going to refer to is smart research. This is a smart student channel. Effective research, when I teach it in my smart student writing academy, it's called smart research. All right, so smart equals strategic. Anything you do in academics smartly is always going to be done strategically. Now the question is, what does this mean in regards to research? So smart equals strategic. What does that mean for research? What it means is being selective. So the best strategy that you'll always have when it comes to researching a topic, anything in general, is you want to be selective about your information. And here's why. Now I'm actually going to explain this with one of our favorite things in the world, money. I want to start with you thinking about the researching process in general. It typically goes something like this. You have a topic to research. You go to the place you're going to research it, say online, a book, your textbook, an article, whatever the case may be. You read. That is the process of you researching. You get the information you need, and then that's what you're going to use in your paper. So in other words, topic, go look for the information, sift through the information, translate it into your writing on your paper. That's the process of researching, right? Now it's safe to say that this uses energy from your brain. And so I want you to think about your brain power now, and rather than think of it as energy and brain power, I want you to think of that power in terms of currency. We're going to say your brain power is divided up into a bunch of dollar bills. And so now with that, let's think about the researching process. So again, you start with that topic. You go to the place you're researching. We're going to say the internet for this example. When you're on the internet, you are spending your currency on the articles you read. So when you're sifting through different potential sources, let's say I find a journal article here. I read part of it. That's a, that's some brain currency spent. Let's say I read the whole thing. That's going to take more of my brain currency, but I read that. It didn't necessarily fit my topic. So I go find something else. This time it's just a webpage. Again, more currency. That kind of fits great. I still need more. So I keep going and I think you can see where I'm going with this, but the researching process, you keep spending and spending and spending and spending until you have nothing left. The reason I like to explain researching to students like this is because one of the biggest complaints I get about research is that the process is so tiring, taxing. You don't know what to look for. You end up with this information overload. You end up with this information overload, which makes it hard for you to formulate your thoughts, hard for you to move forward with actually writing the paper. If you can relate to this, let me know because that's the research process that I find most students currently have. And I like to refer to this as researching blindly. In other words, you're searching, hoping that the articles are going to tell you what you need. You kind of know what you're looking for, but you don't really know how to find it. And so you're sifting through all these sources until you finally find it. And by the time you get to it, you're overwhelmed. Your brain has so much information in it and that's where the fatigue comes from. This is what we want to avoid doing because we want to be smart spenders. We want to save our brain currency as much as possible so we have as much as possible. And so let's go back to smart research. Smart research is strategic, which means being selective. I want you to remember that because what it means is getting the most with the least. So in other words, getting the exact information you need while taking in the least amount of information. Because remember it's that information overload causing problems with your brain processing. So this is why we need to be selective. Now spiel over it. Let's get into some tips of how you can start to do this. So tip number one, set goals. Now you may be thinking, well, I already have a goal. I'm not just typing nothing into my search bar when I do my research. So let me explain. You want to set goals. And the reason is, is because this is how you stop the habit of researching aimlessly doing that blind research, hoping that the information you find will eventually give you the information you need. So this may sound counterintuitive because a lot of you also might think that while I'm doing research because I don't know much about this topic yet, I have to research it to learn about it. Yes, but there are still ways you can set goals to be more direct into getting the information you need. You can still take charge here. So the easiest way to do this, for example, instead plainly, we'll dive into a really simple example is to take your assignment instructions, locate the various objectives you need to meet, and then think logically, literally take a second and set some goals for how you're going to find that information. So a lot of students don't do this. You may think you're doing it, but a lot of students don't actually take that time to look at their objectives and see, okay, I know I need to research this, but let me strategize about how I can get there. So now let me show you a real example. It'll make more sense. The instructions should be pulling up on the screen right here. My computer is here though. So I'm going to read looking down here. We're going to read through the instructions. It's a short assignment, and then we're going to get into setting those goals. All right, here we go. In a two to three page essay, analyze how tariffs and protectionism have affected the worldwide operations of one specific multinational organization. Questions to consider in your essay include, how have tariffs affected the domestic and international operations of the organization? Where has it established its manufacturing plant in response to tariff or protectionist policies? How have tariffs impacted the pricing models? How has protectionism impacted the growth of the organization? And as you can see, there's a few organizations to choose from, but now let's get back to what I was saying. You have your instructions. You look for your specific objectives, and in this case, those objectives are going to be those questions. This is a nicely laid out example where you know exactly the different points you need to make. It's answering those specific questions. All right, so let's say if we're going to write about Starbucks and we're going to answer these questions pertaining to tariffs and protectionism, great. Rather than just take to the internet and start looking for information to slowly plug into these questions, let's set some specific goals and let's start with those goals, fulfill them, and then work through the questions. That way, you now take charge and you're able to go to the internet and look for specific information without researching aimlessly. This is how you start getting away from that blind research. So in this first example, goal number one is probably going to pertain to that first question because if you notice, all the questions build on each other. So you kind of have to do the research for how tariffs affect this company domestically and internationally before you can answer the second question, where has it established its manufacturing plant in response to that tariff in protectionism policies. Now you can even get more specific within that one question. Note how you're looking at domestic and international operations. It would be smart of you to focus on domestic first. So let's say you're here in the US, you're researching Starbucks. Now you have a very specific goal that you're trying to answer. So in your search query, your searches are going to be a lot more focused and targeted. And that leads me right into my second tip, which is to focus on one goal at a time. Now that may sound like common sense, but what's actually more common is that students tend to look at their instructions as a whole note, how all those objectives build on each other. So I'm going to let you in on a little secret here, but most assignments are structured that way. In other words, the first thing you're writing about is typically setting you up for the next thing. And so if you can focus on one at a time, you're going to move through that list of objectives a lot faster than say jumping around or focusing on them as a whole. But I hope you understand with what I mean by keeping your research as focused and direct as possible, because that's how you become that smart spender. Let's go ahead and move on to the last tip here in this last one ties into what I said in the beginning of this video, and that is to get the most with the least. In other words, don't be afraid to walk away from a source sooner rather than later. So let me explain. So when you're reading through an article, now that you have a better idea of what you're looking for, if you can clearly see that it doesn't fit that need or it's going another direction, go ahead and move on to the next article because the sooner you get to that information, the quicker you're going to fulfill your objectives. That again is how you become that smart spender. That's how you're going to buy the most with the spending the least amount of money. The reason I bring this up is because what's really common in this situation is that when a student finds the article they're reading through it, they can kind of see it doesn't fit their needs, but for some reason it's hard for them to walk away. The reason for this is called the sunk cost fallacy. This is where it's a mentality rather that you've put in time and energy into something that it's harder to walk away once you've done that, that you're more likely to keep going when clearly it would have been better for you to walk away a lot sooner. So this is me telling you to be very picky about the information you digest. If there's a keyword that absolutely discredits that article, move on to another one. If the title is slightly off from what you're looking for, move on to something else. As soon as the information is no longer relevant, go ahead and move on to the next. So in this example, what this might look like is say we're still working on goal number one. We're trying to fulfill Starbucks tariffs and how it is domestically for them here in the US. Great. So we've got an article and it starts talking about a trade war between the US and China and how it affected Starbucks. Okay, great. That still might fit this objective. So let's keep reading. However, the article all of a sudden takes an extreme political turn. When the article takes that political turn, it's no longer relevant to your research. So in this case, go ahead and move on. Now you may skim the headings for the rest of the article just to see if it turns back at any point to information you might use later on, but that's it. Remember, the less information floating around your mind, the easier it's going to be to translate your research into writing on your paper. But anyways, that's it for this introduction to the researching mini series. Basically the purpose of this video is to restructure your mentality around the researching process. Because again, this isn't something any of us were really taught anywhere in school, in college, growing up or where you're at now. And so we need to change the way we think before we can change the way we approach our researching process. Because right now, I promise you're probably using systems that don't work for you. Otherwise you wouldn't be watching this video. So next week I'm going to dive into the different parts of a research paper. I'm literally going to break down all the different sections in a research paper because I find this is kind of a unicorn for a lot of you out there because you've never had a research paper broken down for you. And then one day you're assigned to write one and it's a big question mark. And so I want to answer that for you. In the meantime, have a good week.