Scholarly writing or academic scholarship tends to come from people (like your professors) producing knowledge and engaging in conversation with fellow scholars in their field. As Professor Dolson notes for your assignment "Scholars talk with one another through the articles they publish" and different academic disciplines investigate and speak differently. This is called scholarly conversation.

Look for clues and criteria indicating an article or book is scholarly:

• The author most likely will list their credentials such as their highest degree, university affiliation, and department.
• The author uses highly specialized language, specific to a discipline or area of study.
• The work includes extensive citations, bibliographies, or footnotes, showing the author is aware of a body of scholarship relevant to the field.
• The content has been published by an academic institution or university press, the journal is specific to a field of study or discipline.
• The author's work is most likely "peer reviewed" or has gone through a rigorous editorial process by fellow experts in the field, which can take a long time. This timeframe can be an impediment for those doing research on current topics.

Remember- academic scholarship is only one type of information source. It isn't necessarily more valid or objective than other types of sources, you should use these sources as your research requires.

What are some good tips to decipher the most credible and useful source? This is a very important question! Always be thinking critically about the author's methodologies, arguments, claims, and data analysis. How do they support their claims, what evidence do they provide? How are they using the work they cite in their arguments? It's not always easy to tell if something is credible or biased unless you know a little bit more about the author- don't be hesitant to Google them or see what else they have published, if they are associated with any partisan organizations, or espouse certain beliefs, or if their work has been debunked. See what other scholars are saying about their work- do they disagree or disagree and why? The important thing for you as a researcher is to decide whether this source is relevant to your project. Maybe you are interested in looking at texts from a particular perspective or time period that are very obviously biased, maybe you are interested in arguing against an author's claims. The important thing is if you decide to include a source, you should provide some context about the source, acknowledge its bias or lack of credibility and justify why you are using it. 

Let's look at this scholarly article together:

Maurantonio. (2021). Burning Karen’s Headquarters: Gender, Race, & the United Daughters of the Confederacy Headquarters. Memory Studies, 14(6), 1159–1172. https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211054273

Note the author's credentials. Notice the abstract summarizing the article first, and how the article is organized- including an introduction explaining the research question, citations from scholarly sources like books and articles, news sources, encyclopedia entries, and even Twitter.