After you identify your communication’s purpose and audience, it’s time to gather data. Ask and answer the following questions:
- What is the question I need to answer in this document, or the problem that needs to be solved?
- Where can I find the answer?
- For each source: What is the source’s relevance? What is the actual information I need to use from this source?
If you like mapping, a map of these questions might look like this:
Where can I find the answer?
As you can see, gathering information begins with questions. Before you begin to find sources, you must determine your purpose and audience—what’s the goal of the technical document, what does your audience need to know, and how much do they need to know? After these basic questions, consider sources that will yield what your audience needs to know. Should you get first-person reflections and commentary? Statistics and facts? News reports? Scientific analyses? History?
For example, if you are asked to describe a recent piece of legislation for a non-specialist audience to help them understand it, then you need to locate the full text of the bill as well as commentary about the legislation from reliable news organizations such as The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. If you are asked to write a brief that deals with population changes for marketing executives, you might go to the U.S. Census Bureau or the Pew Research Center. If you are asked to write a recommendation for a new app to be installed on every company phone, you might gather information from both technical journals and end users via online reviews and blogs. The “Where can I find the answer?” question seems simple, but requires that you analyze the communication situation to identify all possible, appropriate sources of information you’ll need to create the communication efficiently and effectively.
In general, there are two main categories of sources.
- Primary sources—first person accounts: interviews, raw data from survey results, observations
- Secondary sources—others’ analyses and interpretations: journal articles, reviews, government reports, trade reports, organizational reports
Primary and secondary research often work together. For example, if you work in local government, you may be asked to write a report on using STEM knowledge to improve the quality of life for the homeless population in your city. You might gather secondary research to identify best or common practices, trends, statistics, and current research about homelessness both broadly in the U.S. and your state, and more narrowly in your city. You might gather primary research from interviews with homeless shelter administrators, clients, and volunteers, advocates for the homeless in your area, and your own observations. Depending on your purpose and audience, it’s often useful to consider and gather information from both primary and secondary sources, as appropriate.
Source Relevance and Quality?
Once you identify the types of sources from which to access information, question each source’s relevance and quality. Since so much information of variable quality is available online, you need select credible sources that can provide reliable and useful data that speaks to your purpose and audience. In this era of fake news, deliberate misinformation, and alternative facts, developing the skill to evaluate the credibility of sources is critical.
Ask and answer the following questions to determine sources’ relevance and quality as you gather information.
| Authority Researchers Authors Creators |
Who are the researchers/authors/creators? Who is their intended audience? What are their credentials/qualifications? What else has this author written? Is this research funded? By whom? Who benefits? Who has intellectual ownership of this idea? How do I cite it? Where is this source published? What kind of publication is it? Authoritative Sources: written by experts for a specialized audience, published in peer-reviewed journals or by respected publishers, and containing well-supported, evidence-based arguments. Popular Sources: written for a general (or possibly niche) public audience, often in an informal or journalistic style, published in newspapers, magazines, and websites with a purpose of entertaining or promoting a product; evidence is often “soft” rather than hard. |
|---|---|
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Content |
Methodology What is the methodology of their study? How has evidence been collected? Is the methodology sound? Can you find obvious flaws? What is its scope? Does it apply to your project? How? How recent and relevant is it? What is the publication date or last update? |
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Data Is there sufficient data here to support the author’s claims or hypotheses? Do they offer quantitative and/or qualitative data? Are visual representations of the data accurate, or are they misleading or distorted in some way? |
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Purpose |
Why has this author presented this information to this audience? Why am I using this source? Will using this source bolster my credibility or undermine it? Am I “cherry picking” – the use of inadequate or unrepresentative data that only supports my position (and ignores substantial amount of data that contradicts it)? Could “cognitive bias” be at work here? Have I only consulted the kinds of sources I know will support my idea? Have I failed to consider alternative kinds of sources? Am I representing the data I have collected accurately? Are the data statistically relevant or significant? |
sample information gathering/evaluation
Remember the ongoing sample situation:
Your manager tasks you to provide a briefing about a European Court of Justice ruling to search engine optimization specialists who work in the field with clients. Your manager suspects that clients of the firm will ask about the ruling and she wants consultants to be able to answer clients’ questions with confidence based on the latest information.
To start gathering sources, you decide to start with Techmeme, which is a technical news aggregator that ranks and sorts news according to whether its own audience – the community of people who consume technology news – use, respect, or appreciate that news. Aggregators use algorithms that track links from popular blogs and other means to do that, so you know the information is reliable as it has been endorsed by a lot of people who write and comment about technology. You realize that you cannot use an aggregator such as Techmeme exclusively, but it’s a good place to start.
Here’s a portion of a table with your Techmeme search filled out; you’d add to the table with other sources. You could also note and track your sources using a mind map.
| What is the question? | What are journalists and commentators saying about the guidelines on the “Right to be Forgotten” and more current rulings from the European Court of Justice? |
| Where can I find the answer? | Techmeme is an aggregator of news content about digital technologies or digital technology service providers like Google. |
| Source |
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| Relevance | Techmeme is an aggregator of news content about digital technologies or digital technology service providers like Google. The information gathered using Techmeme does not include the guidelines themselves. However, it does provide argument and commentary about the guidelines that could be used to develop an understanding of their intent. |
| Information | Information links to respected online publications and blog posts, highly respected in the technical community. |
