A style guide is a book that outlines the "rules" necessary to follow for any one kind of writing. These rules may be about simple things like grammar and punctuation, or more substantive questions about citation, layout, or format. Some guides may also speak to style elements such as tone and voice.

The world is full of information to be found--however, not all of it is valid, useful, or accurate. Evaluating sources of information that you are considering using in your writing is an important step in any research activity.

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work-in the web browser itself.

Capture anything. Access anywhere.

What do you use to keep your resources together? I really enjoy Evernote for keeping random notes together and Google Docs for keeping my excel and word documents "in the cloud." Of course Diigo is great for keeping links together. Zotero is great for keeping references and citations together (APA format, etc.). Do you use any other tools to keep your digital life organized?

You can begin evaluating a physical information source (a book or an article for instance) even before you have the physical item in hand. Appraise a source by first examining the bibliographic citation. The bibliographic citation is the written description of a book, journal article, essay, or some other published material that appears in a catalog or index. Bibliographic citations characteristically have three main components: author, title, and publication information. These components can help you determine the usefulness of this source for your paper. (In the same way, you can appraise a Web site by examining the home page carefully.)

Evaluating web pages skillfully requires you to do two things at once: Train your eye and your fingers to employ a series of techniques that help you quickly find what you need to know about web pages; Train your mind to think critically, even suspiciously, by asking a series of questions that will help you decide how much a web page is to be trusted. This page is organized to combine the two techniques into a process that begins with looking at your search results from a search engine or other source, follows through by investigating the content of page, and extends beyond the page to what others may say about the page or its author(s).

HubSpot has compiled 101 marketing charts and graphs based on original research and data from a variety of sources, including analysis of our 3,500 business customers, surveys with hundreds of businesses responding, analysis of the data in our free tools like Website Grader, Twitter Grader and Facebook Grader.  Click through the presentation on this page for a preview, and then download the entire presentation as a PPT file and PDF file for your own use.