Smarthinking

Do you know about Smarthinking? This is a service that NDSCS supports to give you 24/7 access to tutoring and topic helps. Among others, there is a Writing Lab that can help you with papers for any class. Some things they can help with are lab reports, business plans and literary analysis. You can forward them a paper and have them critique it with you.

You will need a password and login to set up your account, so first contact your instructor or the library to find out how to get started. The website is

http://www.smarthinking.com/

You will set up a new username and password to use whenever you access Smarthinking for tutoring. Then you can get help whenever you need it.

Pros and Cons

A common essay given to English classes is to take a stand on an issue, either pro or con, and defend that stand with support from articles and books by scholarly or expert individuals. If you are looking for materials that will help you in this type of paper, here are some sources to look at.

Opposing Viewpoints: http://www.ndscs.edu/library/magazine.jsp
Choose the Gale Group and click on the link to Opposing Viewpoints.

ProCon.org: http://www.procon.org

Also, we have books from the Opposing Viewpoints series in the library, another set on Clashing Views, and others. Check in the ODIN catalog for details.

Writing Professionally

It has been said that the best way to learn to write is to apply the seat of the pants firmly to your chair and write. But eveyrone always needs some help in certain areas, often style, grammar, spelling and so on. We have recently added some new guides in writing, with some professional tips as well. There are many more out there. Take time to read some earlier posts and look at the new links on the left of the page. There will certainly be something useful to help you in creating the best written project that you can.

New MLA standards

There will be new standards coming out for MLA citations, probably in the April edition. We are reading that they are going to be easier for undergraduates to work with, as well as updating to take advantage of the newer online resources that have developed since the current edition was published. All the old MLA instructions will need to be rewritten over the summer. I will keep an eye on this have something ready for fall semester. In the meantime, keep on with the current standards.

New Book reviews weekly

Did you know that reviews of new books in the library are published everyweek in the NDSCS eTransmitter? There is always an interesting variety of new materials coming to the library every week, and we want to share these for you to find. In the library, the new books have their own display area, and we focus on some of these in our weekly article. They are always available to be checked out.

See the link to the weekly article at the left.

New MLA standards

With the upcoming April edition of the MLA standards, there are significant changes in making citations of articles and web sites. If you would like to get acquainted with them, you will want to check out some of the tutorials that are available. Before using the new standards, however, make sure which style your instructor wants you to use during this transition time.

See the links at left for tutorials from other campuses. Changes for scholars and graduate students are in effect as of January 1; changes for undergraduates are expected later in the year.

Doing Library Research

Anyone can find research in the library. But "doing library research" means to create something new, something no one has yet written about. It may be a small research paper for a class, or a large book for professional reasons, but it is all library research.

Several disciplines depend a great deal on library research. These include history, literary studies, musicology, sociology, political science, and anthropology. As a researcher you find primary documents, read and browse through other people's research, and put it all together in a unique way. Libraries pull together a lot of material and help you locate it, but the researcher does the work.

Points to remember: faster isn't better; take time to browse and make mental connections; reinterpret what you read; the more you know, the more you can develop by what you read. Look for patterns to create a conversation. Efficiency is not a virtue.