Utilising Zotero(Jan. 27th)

I was finally able to successfully download Zotero and install it into word. It allowed me to smoothly create in-text citations in my word document. At first, I thought that it did not work but it worked perfectly fine and after a little explanation from Mr.Paterson I was fine on my own creating in-text citations. It was surprisingly fun and interesting to do this task because this process has never been this easy. I felt really dumb for spending hours on citations in the past but I’m glad I was introduced to this app. It was also a really good opportunity for me to check which reference came from which source and allowed me to recheck if I was writing the correct information. Something I was literally blown away by was the works cited list at the end. Before finding out about this app, writing that list of sources would be a big of a burden as writing a whole paragraph if not more. However, now Zotero does this for me within seconds and a lot more efficiently and neatly formatted. Also, the app figures out which source I used in that document so that the sources I did not actually use are in my works cited list.

For the past few months, I had tried to deepening my research as much as I could but I could barely find any good sources. Being told we need quite a lot of sources, I felt nervous and did not know if I could find enough to meet the expectations of our teacher. However, since most of the papers I used a resource for my essay was a pdf file I had to look for the actual paper on Google Scholars. This reminded me that I should utilize google scholars more and find more papers from the website. I started to research deeply about my own topic and found quite a lot of papers that had really interesting and helpful information. I was shocked by how helpful it was and regretted that I did not check Google Scholars earlier in the project. I was able to add a few more facts due to these papers, add a few more citations and finally get closer to finishing my essay. I am excited to finally finish my academic essay that I have put so much effort into. This is the first time I have spent so much time writing on one and is the first time I properly wrote all the citations and used all these writing tools in the process of writing it. I think this would be a good opportunity for me to learn all these new skills/apps and improve them so I can look back on this essay in the future when I need to write an academic essay.