Secondary Sources

The Filtered Truth of Secondary Sources In the news, people do not completely know that what they are reading is correct. This is the sad truth for any secondary source of information, such as magazines, articles, newspapers, etc. No secondary source of information holds the complete truth as does original primary source. The sources can still possess similarities to each other, but the point is how truthful is the secondary source to the primary source of information. To show how secondary sources of information can differ from or are similar to the primary source, let us examine two sources. The topic, taken from the study, of the two sources is on how the seven days are mentally represented in human minds, which leads to answering the question of why humans often forget what is the current day. In the actual research article published in the PLOS one Journal entitled “Mental Representations of Weekdays,”

The primary source (Ellis, Wiseman, & Jenkins, 2015) is for an audience of fellow researchers (people with greater knowledge of the subject) or simply people with longer attention spans that want to discover more on the subject. The primary source is long, organized, and scientific. It is very detailed and is statistically tested with results. Finally, it holds a certain level of diction that is for people that are more educated. It is opposite for the secondary source (McIntosh, 2015), it is for people who are not educated on the subject and are younger; these people have short attention spans also. The article is short, unorganized, and entertaining. McIntosh quotes when he needs to quote, but he is on the surface level in showing the facts. He writes for a news audience that desires to read quick facts, especially with lines that pop out because of bold or enlarged font size. He is straight to the point but cuts corners. The audiences reading the two articles are clearly