After Brainstorming, one must move on to researching those fantastic ideas, add them to the outline or reference section, which will make the writing more stronger and successful. Therefore, finding the appropriate reference materials, read them through, as well as selecting the most relevant parts to be included in the essay become the most critical step in Academic writing.

Finding useful resources

Before finding the writing resources, one will need to define the task in order to grasp exactly what the resulting text need. For students, do not limit the writing resources to those provided by the lecturers, therefore, they need to look elsewhere, such as academic journals, or go to the library. For those who are addict to internet surfing, Online search can be useful too. Wikipedia is generally not considered to be a reliable resource, though it can be beneficial to get a general understanding. Wherever your information comes from, make sure you make a note of important biographic information (title, author name, place of publication or URL, etc.) so that you can find it again if needed and cite and reference appropriately in your assignment.

Reading and Selecting

One will probably have to use a considerable number of resources within the essay. A general rule is the "half percent" rule, which means one would be expected to refer to Five resources for every thousand words. However, one will probably have to read two to three times that many in order to find five good resources. Some of the text that was read will not be useful for the essay, one may not know that until they read through. In order to cope with the volume, one will need to use the reading skills such as skimming and scanning

• Skimming
  Skimming means reading the text quickly in order to get the main idea or gist of the text.

• Scanning
  Looking through the paragraph quickly to find specific information, which is also commonly used in everyday life