DOCUMENTATION
Responsibilities
DR: responsibilities.
If your teacher does not say that an assignment requires research, assume it does not. If you have any doubt, consult your teacher. Your library and the internet contain a vast number of sources, which vary in purpose, method and quality. It is easy to make mistakes. Whether or not your teacher expects research, you are responsible for documenting your sources in proper form. Undocumented use of others’ ideas (not just their phrasing) can put you in the embarrassing position of appearing to intend to cheat.
Plagiarism is the use of others’ words and ideas as your own without crediting the sources. Documentation is the practice of providing notes and bibliographies which allow readers to trace ideas to their sources and, if interested, to learn about the subject in greater detail. It protects the writer from any appearance of plagiarism.
What must you document?
You must document any use of another person’s words or ideas, and any facts which are not general knowledge. Information obtained through electronic sources is governed by the same rules that apply to printed sources.
Students often have difficulty knowing what constitutes general knowledge. There are no absolute rules, but you can usually trust the following principles:
Knowing What to Document
Which of the following statements would usually require documentation in an academic paper?
NO: Facts taken from your textbook or class lectures, or easily available in an encyclopedia.
Examples: The names of the moons of Mars; the years of the Han Dynasty.
YES: Highly specific facts or statistics.
Example: The casualties in the war in Afghanistan.
YES: Interpretations of facts or texts, if they are derived from an outside source. Use of either specific phrasing or general ideas requires documentation.
Example: An interpretation of a poem, if any part of the interpretation comes from a website, including sites like SparkNotes and Shmoop that are intended for high school students.
NO: Well known quotations.
Examples: “I have a dream”; “To be or not to be.”
YES: Anyone else’s words, whether quoted exactly or paraphrased.
EXTRA HELP: To Document or Not to Document?
Part 1. What requires documentation?
1. The arrival of Commodore Perry ended Japan’s long seclusion from the outside world.
2. Some early Marvel superhero comics were Cold War allegories about democracy and Communism.
3. In the five years after the potato famine, Ireland lost a fourth of its population.
4. The last Hawaiian monarch was forced to abdicate the throne in 1895.
5. The governor’s restrictions on large social gatherings during the public health crisis made some angry citizens consider him a Scrooge who would say “Bah, humbug!” at Christmas.
6. To modern readers of The Scarlet Letter, the heroine seems a courageous feminist, but Nathaniel Hawthorne elsewhere called women writers “ink-stained Amazons.”
The answers appear at the bottom of the page.
Part 2. What constitutes plagiarism?
Suppose five students are writing on Homer’s Odyssey, and they want to use this passage from a book by Moses Hadas called A History of Greek Literature (Columbia University Press, 1950):
The figure of Odysseus himself, who has become a symbol of restless questing, is a combination of the weary traveler making his toilsome way home and the insatiable seeker driven by a demonic urge. (24-25)
The students write the following passages in their essays. Which are plagiarized?
Student 1. Odysseus is both a weary traveler and an insatiable seeker. Homer depicts him as a complex character.
Student 2. Odysseus, a complex character, combines the exhausted labor of a homesick man and the unquenchable passion of a restless adventurer.
Student 3. Moses Hadas considers Odyssues a complex character. He is both a weary traveler and an insatiable seeker.
Student 4. Odysseus has different sides to his character. He is cautious and vengeful, wise and impulsive, proud and humble. Moses Hadas recognizes the complexity of Homer’s hero, calling him “a combination of the weary traveler . . . and the insatiable seeker” (224-25).
Student 5. Odysseus has been seens as a complex character whose travels are motivated by unquenchable passion as well as exhaustion and homesickness (Hadas 24-25).
Answers
Part 1. The statements that would require documentation are 2 (an interpretation not entirely by the student), 3 (a very specific fact) and 6 (a quotation that is not well known). The facts in 1 and 4 are widely known and easily obtained. The quotation in 5 is not evidence for the argument or directly relevant to the topic; it is a familiar literary allusion used for rhetorical effect.
Part 2. Student 1 uses Hadas’s very words without acknowledging them. Student 2 changes the words but uses Hadas’s ideas. Since student 3 credits Hadas only with the first idea, the reader will assume that the second sentence expresses an original thought.
Only students 4 and 5 have not committed plagiarism. Student 4 does not simply present Hadas’s idea, but uses it to support an original interpretation. Student 5 does not use Hadas’s phrasing but carefully credits him as the source of the idea. Note that student 5 mentions Hadas in the parenthetical citation because Hadas’s name is not mentioned in the sentence.
Students 1, 2 and 3 could have avoided plagiarism in the following ways:
Student 1. Odysseus is both a “weary traveler” and an “insatiable seeker” (Hadas 24-25).
Student 2. Moses Hadas considers Odysseus a complex character who combines the exhausted labor of a homesick man and the unquenchable passion of a restless adventurer (24-25).
Student 3. Moses Hadas points out the complexity of Odysseus, calling him a “weary traveler” and an “insatiable seeker” (24-25).