Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? When doing research, it is better to use printed materials such as books and articles than it is to use the Internet. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Due to the great technological advance in the past years, books and articles became more common and easier to find on the internet, some people believe that this type of material is not as good as printed books to do research. I disagree with this idea because, in my opinion, online materials can offer more benefits than printed ones. I feel this way for two specific reasons, which I will expose in detail in the subsequent paragraphs.
To begin with, many mistakes can be made and found in both printed and online materials. While printed materials can take years to be corrected, the online ones need a click for a better version. Furthermore, whilst the variety of content on the internet is enormous, the traditional books have the limited space. Moreover, nowadays the most recent discoveries and news are put first on the internet, and only a couple of days or weeks later these new pieces of information are printed on paper. Thus, if you want to do good research you need to have updated material, which is easier to find online. It is better demonstrated by my personal experience. I recently graduated in Biological Sciences, so I needed to do much research to have good grades. Hence, once I needed to do research on the library because the internet connection was under maintenance, and this experience was terrible, since the content that I found was outdated and did not help me to conclude my homework, but when I went home and search on the internet, I could rapidly find everything updated and used it to complete my research.
Second, sometimes you only need a specific piece of information on some book, and to get it, you have to search for almost the entire book, which takes a long time. However, in online ones you can quickly find what you want once there are many tools to make this process easy. In many online books, you can search for specific words, and rapidly you will be directed to the part of interest. Drowning from my experience, during my graduation, I did not have much time to do my homework, so I needed to be very agile to get everything before the deadline. This way, if I had not used the search tool on online books, I might have had problems with my work and consequently with my grade.
In light of the above-mentioned reasons, I am of the opinion that using material on the internet to do research is better than using printed ones. It is because many advantages can be found in online materials, such as the capacity to find updated material easily and the search tool that makes possible to find specific subjects quickly.
Submitted by Filipe Gomes on