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Where to Start Your Research

Lateral Reading


"Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking."

-Michael Caufield, from Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

 


 

Features of Lateral Reading

 

"When reading laterally, one leaves a website and opens new tabs along the browser’s horizontal axis, drawing on the resources of the Internet to learn more about a site and its claims. When reading laterally, fact checkers paid little attention to features of a website like its appearance or contents. Instead, they quickly leapt off the landing page to open new tabs. Fact checkers, in short, learned most about a site by leaving it."

-Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, from Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information 


Charleston Southern University Library