Week of March 1

You should now be progressing in your research.  If you are doing about an hour of research a night, you should have finished the first week with several pages worth of notes, or about a dozen or more notecards.  Remember, you must cite each source in MLA format before you take notes.  Keep the notes from each source separate from other sources.  It is less important to have a large number of sources, and more important to find a large amount of research information.

In terms of what you are finding, you should be forming a list of possible causes, and starting to determine this week which cause you will focus on in your paper.  You should be moving away from using reference materials such as encyclopedias, and instead start to look up some of the keywords you generated last week in better sources such as books, magazines, newspapers, or websites.  You are still going to want to be careful about which sources you trust at this point-- you don't have enough info yet to be really sure that what you find is trustworthy! 

By the end of this week, you should be in a place where you have determined which cause is the main cause you will talk about in your essay, and will then spend next week finding out as much as you can about that cause as possible.