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Project Writing and Research E-Textbook: Lateral Reading

Project Writing and Research - where the Library and First Year Writing courses team up for student success! This textbook has been collaboratively developed to introduce the basic skills that students need for beginning research.

Lateral Reading: Introduction & Goals

Introduction

Lateral reading means searching outside the box. Instead of going straight ahead on the narrow path, lateral searching is looking to your left and your right, and finding sources that you didn't expect.

Goals

By the end of this module, you should have at least three new ideas for finding information on your topic.

Step 1: View tutorial

Watch the following three videos. While you're watching, take notes about what lateral searching means and how to do it. You'll need these notes later.

Direct link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPiz5cVIBtA

Step 2: View part 2 of the tutorial

Step 3: View part 3 of the tutorial

Step 4: Citation searching

Print and read the attached handout, which describes a very important lateral searching technique called citation searching. This is a way to use one good source to find many others.

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