Q&A!






	VOLUME 3 ISSUE 4

	Mysterious explosions on Mars. Objects moving rapidly toward Earth. Fiery crashes in nearby towns. Audiences gathered around their radios on Halloween eve nearly 70 years ago heard these startling news bulletins. And nearly a million people who missed Orson Welles' introduction to the Mercury Theatre adaptation of "The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells went into a panic – frantically phoning police and radio stations or even piling themselves and their families into cars and fleeing. In subsequent weeks, many angry letters were sent by listeners who felt frightened and duped by the play, says Lee Ann Potter in her Social Education article "War of the Words: Letters to the FCC regarding Welle's 1938 broadcast." But many millions more, she reports, were delighted by the performance. Why? In a Sun Times review of the movie "Dawn of the Dead," critic Roger Ebert says, "We like to be frightened. We like a good creepy thrill." If you like to be frightened, celebrate this Halloween by checking out one of Chicago Film Critics Association's 100 Scariest Movies of all Time – an excellent list which includes many obscure gems and older horror films you may have missed. Better yet, let your own imagination — which can be much scarier than the most sophisticated computer-generated images — give you a good creepy thrill and curl up with H. G. Wells' original The War of the Worlds. Just keep the lights on.

			17 October 1931 – Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion. 24 October 1929 – The New York Stock Exchange crashes. 31 October 1541 – Michelangelo Buonarroti completes his painting "The Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel.


	If you really care about the results, there some basic steps you should take as you work through the writing process. Dr. David R. Williams cautions against trying to write your paper in one draft "unless it is already 3:00 a.m. of the morning the paper is due and you are so far gone that you don't care what grade you get as long as the assignment is accepted." The first draft, he goes on to explain, "is always just a rough sketch of possibilities." In his book Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave's Guide to Writing the College Paper (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000), 6, Williams suggests this four-step approach to writing: The very act of writing can itself be liberating. The rough first draft may well be nothing more than a page or two of hastily scribbled impressions. If you have any interest or curiosity at all, whether negative or positive, about a specific character or phrase or event, begin describing it. You will be amazed how soon ideas begin to flow. But under no circumstances should you think of this first effort as any more than the jotting down of rough preliminary notes. If the first draft, then, is barely comprehensible, the second draft is your best working paper. This is written once you have a pretty good idea of what you want to do. It is the skeleton of what will become your final paper. It is also the hardest one to write. Do not worry here about perfection, for this is also the draft that you next must comb over carefully to correct logic and organization, to note where better evidence is called for or has been left out, or where the argument has wandered off the path. The third draft then comes close to being your finished paper, but this is the copy that needs to be examined closely for typos, grammatical mistakes, misspellings, and other last-minute problems. Ideally, then, your fourth draft should be your final paper. Okay, laugh, but at least you've been told. For more helpful writing tips from Dr. Dave, click here.

Q: What's a question and answer search? A: It's a powerful technique which delivers very specific results.

According to Living Internet, "Question and answer searching leverages the considerable power of phrases to get Internet search engines to return only results that match a multi-word string of characters. The longer the phrase, the fewer the matches and more specific the results."

Living Internet offers further information and examples for using question and answer searches:

A typical question phrase would be "who invented physics", and a typical answer phrase would be "logic was invented by".

Either questions or answers can return good results, although question phrases tend to return information written more in a tutorial mode since explanations are often prefaced with their question, and questions on messages boards, list archives, and Usenet newsgroups have often already been answered by others -- a phenomenon which created the Frequently Asked Questions.

Whether using a question or answer query, try to find as specific a wording as possible to filter the results down to just the pages with the information you are looking for. If the phrase is actually too specific and there are no results, then try different and looser wording until you get some matches. A few example searches are listed below:

Questions Answers

"how do magnets work" "magnets work by"

"what is a spark plug" "spark plugs work"

"how far is a light year" "a light year is"

"how to build a deck" "building a deck"

"how to grow tomatoes" "growing tomatoes"


	Dear Getting Started, You've come to the right place. Questia offers help for all your research projects – from beginning to end! Make our broad research categories your first stop. Here you can browse among such choices as art and architecture, economics and business, education, history, law, psychology and science, among others – to narrow your focus. Clicking on any of the categories will take you to research areas relevant to that area. For example, selecting "Economics and Business" in this list will help narrow your focus by showing more specific categories such as Economic Theory, Economic Systems and Financial Markets or Corporations, Marketing and Management, among others. Keep narrowing your search by clicking on topics which interest you until you arrive at Questia's suggested topic resources. Or, if you prefer, you can browse through Questia's list of more than 6000 specific research topics. Clicking on any of the topics takes you to great resources on that subject. For example, if you click on the topic "Accountability in Education" you'll be taken to a results page which shows 16 of the best books on that subject as well as links to more books on the topic and many suggested related topics. You're likely to find either the exact subject you want to cover or inspiration for another topic, which you can then research within the huge Questia collection. Thanks for writing. Nancy Buchanan Director of Content Development Submitting a question to this column The questions Nancy answers are real; the identity of the enquirer has been changed. Pose your question for Nancy via email at AskNancy@Questia.com. Nancy regrets that it is simply impossible for her to personally respond to all of the hundreds of questions submitted to this column each week. However, she does read every question and tries to select the ones which are of the most general interest to the readers of Q&A! Thank you for understanding.