Does anyone else LOATHE using secondary sources in papers?

[Spiffor]

If it is any indication, I had to do a 23 pages paper recently. It was an illustration of the theory from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Among the books I used, there was a massive tome from Bourdieu himself (ca. 700 pages written in a horrible style), and a much shorter book summing up Bourdieu's system, written by a German professor.

It was an utter pain in the ass to read the original source. It wasted my time terribly, and it didn't bring me much more than what I could find in the summary.

So Vesayen, unless you're in for a real research work, or unless the subject really captivates you, it is not often the best idea to take direct sources.


Besides, you shouldn't underestimate people who have got printed. Sure, some authors simply have a book diarrhea because it's the only way for them to exist. Sur some authors constantly publish the same loonie idea with other words. But many authors have put months if not years of efforts behind their books. They have looked for facts in the most obscure archives, and they have elaborated their point. They're not always right (far from it), but don't imagine it's that easy to "debate them on the ground" when what you had was a 2-hours long interest on the issue.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Aside from what GePap, JohnT, DanS and others have said here, there's also the fact that you could never, in a paper, do the depth of work that a good scholar has done in a book. You're writing a paper in a few weeks -- a year at most, if it's a bachelor's thesis. Scholars have taken years to write the "secondary sources" you're deriding. So stop kidding yourself: you can't duplicate their efforts on your own, even if you had the knowledge and training in the field. You can refer to those works, and thus bring into your paper by proxy an extraordinary depth of learning; or you could go it alone and make an incomplete, more shallow argument. That seems like an obvious choice.