Assignment #4

For my article that we searched for in the library, I ended up finding something on the internet that talks about offshore drilling. The article definitely seemed to have a bias to it, but did provide some good information. It was several pages out of a book called "coastal alert." It had several chapters in it, a few of which I had access to. One part talked about how the government is apparantly "selling the coasts to big oil." Other parts talked about the effects that oil drilling has on ecology and quality of life, the developing of offshore gas and oil and how energy alternatives can supposedly replace offshore drilling. The article was informative, but it's hard to say how informative it was simply because it did seem so biased and one sided and didn't seem to present both sides of the story. In short, it would be much more effective to rhetorically analyze it than to use it for legitimate research on the subject.
I tried a lot of different methods and databases to get articles on oil drilling, and they did bring a lot of things up, but I found myself either going around in circles or just frustrated altogether. Bottom line is, I lost patience. I found that google scholar and google books seemed to help me out most. Maybe it's because google has done a good job, or maybe I'm just too stupid to find anything any other way. But google seemed to be the answer ... again.
The library instruction was very helpful. I can see how the massive amount of databases could be very helpful for research. That was all very new to me. I had absolutely no experience using EBSCO or any of the other databases available through the library's site. That was the nicest thing I learned from the library instruction. That is a lot of information to have access to, and is helpful now, but will most definitely be even more helpful in the future. But like I said, I'm probably just not good enough at using EBSCO and the other legitimate databases yet, and so far, have just resorted to google books to bail me out. But that being said, google books did a very good job for me. This article that I found was only one of many that fit what I was looking for.