Using Sources Beyond Harvard

An organization often needs to develop plans or strategies for action and to persuade people both inside and outside the organization that these plans will lead to success. The job of developing and explaining pieces of an organization's strategy frequently falls to its employees. As someone tasked with developing a strategy (say, for a new product line), you may need to consult sources such as industry reports, economic indicators from federal sources, and internal analysis documents. You'll then have to make a persuasive case about the proposed strategy so that decision-makers adopt it. To do this effectively, you may need to draw on sources such as analyses of previous product launches, news reports of competitors' activities, financial reports, and projections.

As a new associate at a law firm, you will likely be asked to determine if the law supports your client's position. To do this, you will begin to research cases, looking for precedents and analyzing them for fact patterns that can be analogized to your situation. You will also look for legal doctrines and patterns of logic that can be imported into your argument to organize the structure of your propositions. You might also conduct a historical analysis, researching the legislative history to understand why a particular law was passed and how the historical perspective should impact its current application. Additionally, you could look through law reviews and academic journals for broad theoretical perspectives that inform the way you approach the problem.

Once you have done your research, you will need to write up your conclusions in the form of an argument that the partner can use to make the case.

As a medical student, you are asked on a regular basis to write admission notes and discharge notes about patients. At first, you may find yourself transcribing every piece of information you learn from the patient, no matter how disjointed, along with every other bit of available data from other physicians and from laboratory results. After your first few attempts, you may be told that your notes are muddled, disjointed, and difficult to follow. When you begin to think of your task as one of analyzing available sources and distilling the most salient details from each, your notes will take shape, and you will be able to present a clear thought process to the other doctors involved in a patient's care. Your notes then become an argument for what those doctors should consider as they make a diagnosis, and you are contributing to the patient's care by ensuring that the attending physicians can readily see what evidence supports the working diagnosis, what evidence does not, and what information is still missing.