Academic Writing

The following is a report of the search I tried on Friday, June 25, 1999. I was interested in learning more about how some high schools have courses which prepare students for marriage, and I wanted to find the syllabus for such a course, if possible.

First I did a simple search on "high school courses on marriage."

I got 5,083,925 responses. This was obviously too many sites for me to investigate, plus the top entry was Naked College Coeds, which I didn't think was related to my search.

Next I did a Boolean Search using "marriage AND high school course."

I got 176 responses, which was much more reasonable. I didn't take the time to look through them; I'll try again later.

Next, I wanted to find more sites related to Academic Writing and possibly some material for this course.

First I tried a simple search using "ESL Writing."

I got 266,520 responses, far more than I had time to look at.

Next I tried a Boolean Search using "ESL AND writing."

This time I got 62350 responses, which was too many.

I limited the search even more by using "ESL AND writing course."

That gave me 2880 responses, fewer than before but still too many.

I tried "ESL AND writing AND syllabus" instead.

That gave me 4340 responses, MORE than the last one!

Then I used the same terms but limited the beginning date to 1/Jan/99.

That was slightly successful because the number of responses was reduced to 1273.

I changed to search terms back to "ESL AND writing course" and limited the date to start from 1/Jan/99.

This search yielded 347 responses, which was much more reasonable. In fact, I found two sites that looked useful, so I bookmarked them for further reference. One was: