Role of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Sources in Academic Writing

Running head: ENGLISH ASSIGNMENTS
English Assignments
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Essay Question: Should all academic writing be based on primary sources?
Introduction
Academic writing is regarded as a comprehensible, focused and structured form of
writing or documentation aided by evidences. It comprises of formal tone and style and further
aims to provide support to the understanding of the readers (Coolican, 2017).
The three forms of information sources namely; primary, secondary and tertiary provide a
diverse purpose throughout the procedure of any academic research.
This form of academic writing is generally aimed for a distinctive as well as informed
audience.
The paper will assess the role of primary, secondary and tertiary sources in diverse
disciplines of academic writing.
Paragraph 1
The topic of the first paragraph includes the role of primary sources in academic writing.
Primary sources can be defined as the immediate, first-hand account of the topic associated with
academic writing.
A primary source offers raw and direct evidence that incorporates historical, legal
documents, accounts of the observants, experimental consequences. In the domain of natural and
social sciences, primary references are often considered as empirical studies (Coolican, 2017).

2ENGLISH ASSIGNMENTS
The consequences of empirical observations are typically established in academic and scholarly
articles.
An article, “ Smartphone Ownership and Internet Usage Continues to Climb in Emerging
Economies’ by Jacob Poushter reveals a methodology of survey research, thus can be used as an
example of primary source (Poushter, 2016).
Another advantage of primary resources is that the writer can design his own experiment
or questionaries in order to develop an effective research paper. Considering the fact that primary
resources has several advantages, there are some disadvantages too. First of all, conducting
interviews and survey and preparing research paper after analysing them is highly time
consuming (Turner et al. 2011, 96-128). Besides that, evidence that includes eyewitness or
interviews bears a risk of being unauthentic (McDaniel and Gates 2013, 12-15).
Finally, the academic writing by an untrained writer who lacks knowledge about
methodology bears the risk of getting rejected or invalid. Therefore, from the above discussion, it
can be concluded that usage of primary sources has both advantages as well as disadvantages.
Paragraph 2
The topic of this paragraph includes the merits and demerits of Secondary sources in
academic writing. Secondary sources of information can be defined as information that is not
received as first-hand information. Some of the major sources of secondary sources include
scholarly books and articles, information collected from government departments, censuses and
data that were originally collected by other researchers. Like the primary sources, secondary
sources to have several advantages (Peck and Coyle 2012, 120-135). The first and foremost
advantage of secondary sources includes saving of time. Before the emergence of the internet,