Writing about nature requires knowing all the so-called facts of our subject as we can, and then moving beyond them. Research is essential to good nature writing, for we must know all that we can. Or it means being able to negotiate the electronic library catalogue. Granted, it also means time spent in the field, on the river, crouched in shade on the desert, whatever, for those precious fresh observations, but it also means we must know more than we can see at the time. As research resources available electronically continue to increase, both on the Internet and on CDs which may be available, student nature writers will find more information at hand, ready to be transformed into memorable words.
Students can also pool their own information on subjects in an collaborative computer environment.
If several students are working on papers on similar subjects, they can go out separately to do research and then present it on the computer, gathering their different discoveries and responding to those of others. Embedded in this text, and available at the click of the mouse, are all of the questions and much information that a more experienced reader would bring to the thorough re-reading of a text. Reading in hypertext does something rather wonderful to a person's perception of reading anything. This applies to the reading of nature as well, for as they soon decide, nature is a hypertext embedded with numerous possibilities of meanings, many of which depend upon having information and asking the best questions. To write about nature is to pull out that embedded hypertext.