Communication

Argumentation Theory: Proposition Voter Guide Paper 

Image credit: Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

How to register to vote and where to find information about candidates and election issues.

California

Find data about contributions to campaigns at the national, state, and local level.

California

SIFT (Four Moves and a Habit) Website Evaluation 

1. Stop

First, when you first hit a page or post and start to read it — STOP. Ask yourself whether you know the website or source of the information, and what the reputation of both the claim and the website is. You don’t have that information, use the other moves to get a sense of what you’re looking at. Don’t read it or share media until you know what it is.

2. Investigate the source

You want to know what you’re reading before you read it. Knowing the expertise and agenda of the source is crucial to your interpretation of what they say. Taking sixty seconds to figure out where media is from before reading will help you decide if it is worth your time, and if it is, help you to better understand its significance and trustworthiness.

3. Find trusted coverage

Sometimes you don’t care about the particular article or video that reaches you. You care about the claim the article is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement. In this case, your best strategy may be to ignore the source that reached you, and look for trusted reporting or analysis on the claim. Your best bet might not be to investigate the source, but to go out and find the best source you can on this topic, or, just as importantly, to scan multiple sources and see what the expert consensus seems to be. In these cases we encourage you to “find other coverage” that better suits your needs — more trusted, more in-depth, or maybe just more varied.

4. Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context

Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. trace the claim, quote, or media back to the source, so you can see it in it’s original context and get a sense if the version you saw was accurately presented.

*Credit for SIFT goes to Mike Caulfield and is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

SIFT (The Four Moves)

Steps you should take every time they come across an unfamiliar claim or source.

Check, Please! Starter Course

Free online course to learn how to fact and source-check in five easy lessons.

Here is a summary of what we practiced during the class session.

Step 1: Construct a search strategy.

• State your question as a sentence.
• Identify key concepts that must be present in the information source; use the connector AND.
• Consider related terms that might be used for a key concept; use the connector OR
• Use truncation symbol for word variations; use an * (asterisk) or most databases; Lexis/Nexis uses  ! (exclamation mark).
• Use “ “ (double quotation) for phrases. Don’t overuse phrase searching. Consider proximity connectors for phrase variation: n# or w#.

Step 2: Determine the type of information you need and where you might find it.

Available through the library.

Use OneSearch or the library databases to locate:

Available in library databases 

Use Internet search tool (Google, Bing, etc.)

Step 3: Evaluate your information using the 5W + 1H model or SIFT method (for websites)  

• Use the Advanced Evaluation Techniques tab on the left.