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English 1213: Composition II: Finding

General searching tips

Search Tips:

  • Spelling matters. If you find no (or few) matches to a keyword search, double check spelling.
  • If you find too many results, enter more keywords to be more specific.
  • If you find no results, remove some keywords (you're being too specific), or broaden the search.
  • When searching for titles, ignore AAn, and The when they start the title.

Combine terms with AND

For example: college students AND study habits

Use OR to broaden the search

For example: (smoking OR tobacco) AND health

Truncation - the addition of a symbol (usually an asterisk *) at the beginning or end of a word stem in a keyword search to retrieve variants containing the root. For example, truncation is particularly useful in retrieving singular and plural versions of words.

Example: librar* would find library, libraries, librarian, librariana, librarianship, etc.

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