ABSTRACT
Research is rather an alarming word. It suggests dedicated workers in white coats patiently decoding the human genome, and embattled professors of literature honing their forensic skills in order to identify or debunk the putative lost works of Shakespeare. It may never have occurred to you that research is something that you, as a student essay-writer, ought to be doing. But research does not always mean taking elaborate steps to find out new things. It often means taking quite simple steps to find out things which are known to a lot of people already. The kind of research which I want to talk about here could be described as the art of looking things up.
