Bailes~Composition 1

You may now be at the stage in your research ready to draft a paper. You'll probably already have some good notes to which you can refer as you draft your paper.

You'll need an outline before you rough out your paper. So if you click on the word "outline" in the last sentence or click on this link you should get some assistance. Your outline is meant to help organize your paper logically and effectively.

If, on the other hand, you have not finished your research or just want to continue digging along the way, you can do some serious work by clicking through the references on Diana Hacker's website, an online gold mine that can get you to numerous sources in the humanities, social sciences, history, and sciences.

(In fact, as an exercise right now, click on Hacker's site. Then roll your mouse over the words "Finding Sources" next to the heading "Social Sciences." A menu of subject areas should drop down. Click on the word "Sociology." When you have a new page, scroll down to the link "SocioSite," and then click on it. This should open a new window for "SocioSite." Now click on "Subjects," and you will be navigated to a page titled "Sociological Subjects." Find the word "Work" and click it. You should be directed to a page titled "Sociology of Labor." Now I will leave the rest to you. Scroll down and look at all the various links related to labor or work. Click on those you're interested in. Make sure you bookmark it so that you can return for research.)

After your outline, you may want help with organizing and formatting the research paper. One website, maintained by Cynthia Cavanaugh at Kean University, offers a clever way to learn how to format your paper MLA style and organize your content.

For citations in the text of your research paper or essays, you'll enjoy Judith Kilborn's The Write Place. Kilborn also provides these helpful criteria for determining whether or not a website is valid or credible enough to use for a research paper. Finally, Kilborn offers some advice on introductory tags for quotes in your research paper.

If you really want some help putting together your Works Cited page, here's a useful tool called the "Citation Maker" that will actually help you organize the cited works.

By the time you get an outline done, a rough draft completed, and your Works Cited page put together, you'll be ready for the final draft. Here's a sample of a final paper with margin notes.

For blogging, comment on where you are in this process of research and share what successes you have experienced or what concerns you may have.