Chapter Five

When evaluating the source you want to examine its relevance, evidence, author, publisher, timeliness comprehensiveness, and genre.  What is relevance?  Relevance is the extent to which a source provides information you can use for your research paper.  You want to ask your purpose when determining the relevance and who your audience is.  As said back in chapter eight, evidence is connected through appeals to authority, emotion, principles, values, beliefs, character, and logic.  The saying "more is better," doesn't necessarily apply for this area.  When you evaluate your source you are going to want to make sure what is both appropriate and useful towards your paper.  All authors can make themselves sound knowledgeable on their topic or certain field they are talking about.  The Internet is a big attribute to this cause.  You don't always want to believe everything read off of it.  A way to prevent using false topics are to look for the description of the author.  Evaluating timeliness, in other words, a source's publication date, varies according to the writing situation.  If you're topic is on current events, then sources around the 60's-70's wouldn't be smart in spending a lot of time on those.  Same goes if it was vice versa and you were writing about a historical event, you wouldn't want to spend your time on today's current events.  Evaluating the genre gives you a better understanding on its intended reader, kind of appeals and evidence used, as well as the argument likely to be made.  Just a small idea on how to evaluate each source.