Student Research Guide SPQ25/ Evolution of Writing Mediums and Impact on Civilization

My Major Findings from my Research.

• Every writing surface has expanded civilizations communications between each other.
• Writing surfaces showcase people’s creativity.
• People have wanted to record information since the beginning of time.
• With each evolution of writing surface, there are cultural changes that occur in society.
• Each writing surface follows the same format.

Research Advice.

In my research on this topic, I learned that it was best to stay away from most traditional databases. By that I mean you want to look in reference databases, instead of purely academic ones. It is true that I had found a couple in academic databases, but the majority of the ones I looked at were about the preservation of writing material, and not the history. However, there are a couple books on one search, and some articles, that helped with my research a lot. If I knew then what I know now, I would’ve just looked through reference centers and one search.

Reflection.

I think my research started out very slowly, as I wasn’t looking in the right place at all. During this time, I would find articles that I thought would help but turns out they were either just about the writing on the material, or about preserving said material, which both had nothing to do with what it’s connection to people’s communication.

My favorite part of research, though, was when I just looked on the web and found a couple extremely niche articles that still had all the parts of a credible article, like an abstract and a works cited page.

Personally, my path in researching didn’t change much at all, though I did start focusing more less on how the materials were made and more on how people were affected by these materials.