Welcome to Lesson Three. A commentary is only ever as strong as its sources. In this lesson you will learn where to find good ones, and how to show your reader where they came from.
Watch the lesson above. What is said in it is written out below, for reading and revision.
Primary sources come directly from the people involved: government statements, treaties, official statistics. Secondary sources are the analysis of researchers and institutes.
News reports tell us what happened, and when. They are useful, but always check an important fact against a primary source.
Before you trust a source, ask three questions. Who wrote it, and might they have reason to see things one way? When was it written, and is it still current? And what evidence does it offer, or is it merely opinion?
Good places to begin are the websites of the United Nations and of governments, research institutes and think tanks, academic journals, and serious newspapers.
Do be careful with social media, and with chatbots. Both can sound perfectly confident and still be quite wrong. Always find the original.
In a commentary, name your source in the sentence itself, and give a link and the date. If you use someone's exact words, put them in quotation marks.
Copying without acknowledgement is not permitted, and it ends an internship.
Your second task: find five good sources for your own topic. For each, give the title, the link, and one line on what it shows. Submit it using the form beneath this video.