CHECK THE SOURCE.

Millions of people everyday are susceptible to being misled by the hoodwinking internet, and are completely unaware that it is happening.

High School English Paper

Everyone has been assigned that one history essay in high school in which you're asked to research an important historical figure during a certain time period. For this assignment, everyone in the class drew the name of a specific historical figure from the 1500's out of a hat. I happened to pick Sir Francis Drake, a renowned captain and voyager. When I received this name out of the hat my initial reaction was "Oh God, WHY ME?!" I had never heard of Sir Francis Drake and had little to no interest to further my knowledge about him, whatsoever. I reluctantly started "googling" Sir Francis Drake, a plethora of websites appeared seeming to all have a similar context. The website I decided to click seemed a little out of date, but I went ahead and trusted it anyway thinking nothing could go wrong. With Comic Sans as a font and an extremely wacky color scheme, this had to have been published by a student. Unfortunately, at the time I had no idea and didn't care to check whether this website was credible or not.

My first problem was that I only relied on ONE source as the base of information for my entire paper. Who does that?! Then of course not only was this one source unreliable, but the majority was inaccurate. I used this (what had to be student written) website as the basis of my entire historical context for the essay. When I received my graded paper, the original work was covered by the mounds of red ink. As a freshman in high school and the only person to receive a low grade in an advanced class, I was so embarrassed. I immediately went to my 9th grade teacher, Mrs. Gonzalez, to ask what was wrong. She said "Oh Emily, where on earth did you get any of this information?" My response was a timid "google?". She then explained that most of the information I used in the paper was inaccurate, specific dates, titles of important voyages, you name it. I was UTTERLY embarrassed, I immediately remembered how sketchy and out of date the website was in the first place. From that day on I learned to ALWAYS check the source of my websites and always use multiple sources to find reliable information and evidence.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

This is important because millions of people, like myself, have been completely misled due to sites on the internet. This can become very difficult depending on the situation someone might be facing. So remember, always check the source!