Harvest your academic ideas!

It's the harvest festival season!

It's also the early weeks of the academic year, at least for the UK. In some senses, it is time to plough the fields and scatter but academically how does that work?

I've been trying to prepare my garden patch for next year and it is an awful job trying to get all the weeds out as I had left it on its own for a month while I was away and then not well enough to do any gardening. It isn't my favourite job either! Procrastination does not help though! It provides a whole lot more weeds to root out. So, weeds take time and so does sifting through a whole load of searches on online libraries. This and that article appear to be, but prove not to be, relevant; root them out.

Reading all sorts of book chapters and articles helps you start assessing the field of your topic, and working the soil through, and then ideas spring up hopefully well in time to get your essays or chapters seeded well.

However, plough into your thinking anything with an almost relevant area; it is worth noting down those items alongside really relevant ones, in a bibliographic list; use MS Word's bibliographic systems if you like or make your own simply in MS Excel or Access. You could even revert to a paper card system, but a laptop has better capacity for finding what you noted down! Harvest those sources.

Then use them to act as seeds for thinking through your research topic.

Download the pdf articles; read and make notes on them. Find their main argument[s] and work out who might

the author be opposing or trying to correct. Go to those authors and evaluate them for yourself. In your paper, you can show how the debate goes and how you assess the angles and even provide a different angle on the topic. That way your seeds grow and flourish ready for harvesting decently argued assignments, essays, articles or dissertations!

I hope you have a great harvest. If you need help, please contact me. I could help you organise your essay plan or proofread your almost-final production. There are charges as I earn my living this way. Yet, I do wish to help students who want to see the Lord of the Harvest work in this world.