No matter what field of study you are interested in, you will most likely be asked to write an essay that incorporates outside sources during your academic career. For example, a student in an art history course might write a research paper about an artist’s work. Similarly, a student in a psychology course might write a research paper about current findings in childhood development.
Having to write an essay that uses sources may feel intimidating at first. After all, finding the sources and incorporating them into your writing requires a lot of time, effort, and organization. However, searching for sources allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your topic, and the writing process helps you remember what you have learned and understand it further.
In this module, you will be learning how to write using outside sources.
After successfully completing this module, you should be able to:
Develop a general understanding of the research process and the resources and services that are available at the Leeward Community College Library.
Identify when and how to summarize, paraphrase, or directly quote from research sources.
Apply MLA format guidelines to essays that use sources.
Understand and avoid plagiarism.
Before we learn how to use sources, we first need to know how to find sources. Due to the internet, the number of resources available to students is seemingly unlimited! How will you decide which sources to use?
Leeward Community College’s library provides an online tutorial on how to find academic sources for a research assignment. This is called the Information Literacy Tutorial and Exam.
Please read through the Information Literacy Tutorial and then take the exam. Details are in the "Activities" section below.
Now that you have completed the Information Literacy Exam, you are more familiar with how to find appropriate sources. Once you find them, though, what do you do with them? This lesson will help you become familiar with how to incorporate sources into your writing.
One of the challenges of writing an essay using sources is successfully integrating your ideas with the material from your sources. Your essay must explain what you think, or it will read like a disconnected string of facts and quotations. However, you also need to support your ideas with research or they will seem insubstantial. How do you strike the balance?
In the next sections, you will learn about summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting when using sources.
When you summarize material from a source, you zero in on the main points and restate them concisely in your own words. This technique is appropriate when only the major ideas are relevant to your paper or when you need to simplify complex information into a few key points for your readers.
Be sure to review the source material as you summarize it. Identify the main idea and restate it as concisely as you can—preferably in one sentence. Depending on your purpose, you may also add another sentence or two condensing any important details or examples. Check your summary to make sure it is accurate and complete.
When you paraphrase material from a source, restate the information from an entire sentence or passage in your own words, using your own original sentence structure. A paraphrased source differs from a summarized source in that you focus on restating the ideas, not condensing them.
Again, it is important to check your paraphrase against the source material to make sure it is both accurate and original. Inexperienced writers sometimes use the thesaurus method of paraphrasing—that is, they simply rewrite the source material, replacing most of the words with synonyms. This constitutes a misuse of sources. A true paraphrase restates ideas using the writer’s own language and style.
Most of the time, you will summarize or paraphrase source material instead of quoting directly. Doing so shows that you understand your research well enough to write about it confidently in your own words. However, direct quotes can be powerful when used sparingly and with purpose.
Quoting directly can sometimes help you make a significant point. If an author’s words are especially vivid, memorable, or well phrased, quoting them may help you hold your reader’s interest. Less experienced writers sometimes overuse direct quotations in a paper because it seems easier than paraphrasing. At best, this reduces the effectiveness of the quotations. At worst, it results in a paper that seems pasted together from outside sources. Use quotations sparingly for greater impact.
When you do choose to quote directly from a source, follow these guidelines:
Make sure you have transcribed the original statement accurately.
Represent the author’s ideas honestly. Quote enough of the original text to reflect the author’s point accurately.
Use ellipses (...) if you need to omit a word or phrase. Use brackets [ ] if you need to replace a word or phrase
Make sure any omissions or changed words do not alter the meaning of the original text. Omit or replace words only when absolutely necessary to shorten the text or to make it grammatically correct within your sentence.
Remember to include correctly formatted citations that follow the assigned style guide.
Watch these two videos on Summary, Paraphrase, and Quoting Sources. Please note that neither video uses MLA format citations, but you will learn about that later.
Ideas and information taken from sources must be cited in the body of the paper and in the works cited.
Material taken from sources should be used to develop the writer’s ideas. Summarizing and paraphrasing are usually most effective for this purpose.
A summary concisely restates the main ideas of a source in the writer’s own words.
A paraphrase restates ideas from a source using the writer’s own words and sentence structures.
Direct quotations should be used sparingly.
Ellipses and brackets must be used to indicate words that were omitted or changed for conciseness or grammatical correctness.
Always represent material from outside sources accurately.
Throughout the writing process, be diligent about documenting information taken from sources. The purpose of doing so is twofold:
To give credit to other writers or researchers for their ideas
To allow your reader to follow up and learn more about the topic if desired.
You will cite sources within the body of your essay and at the end of the essay in the Works Cited. For our assignments, you will use MLA format. For other classes, you may find that your professor asks you to use another citation format.
Many academic disciplines use their own editorial styles for in-text citations and for listing the works cited. In the humanities, the style that we use is called MLA format. The Modern Language Association (MLA) describes their format in greater detail:
"All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work."
You must cite your sources as you use them. In-text citations (sometimes referred to as parenthetical citations) are required. If someone else wrote it, said it, drew it, demonstrated it, or otherwise expressed it, you need to cite it.
In MLA style, writers place references to sources in their essays to briefly identify the sources and to enable readers to easily find the sources in the Works Cited list. These are called in-text citations or parenthetical citations.
Please review this handout on in-text citations and review the use of signal phrases and how they impact the in-text citations.
Give only the information needed to identify a source, generally the author’s last name and the page number of the passage being cited.
Place the in-text citation next to its source, preferably at the end of a sentence.
No "page" or "pg" or any other variation is used to indicate the page number.
No comma or any other punctuation mark is needed to separate the author’s name and the page number.
After the body of your essay comes the works cited page. It features the sources used in your essay. List the sources alphabetically by last name or list them by title if the author is not known as is often the case of web-based articles.
Please review this handout on the Works Cited.
When asked, many people think plagiarism is simply the copying of someone else's work. Using this definition, an example of plagiarism might be copying and turning in a friend's paper that she wrote for an English class the semester before. Another example would be using a quote from a newspaper article in your essay and changing a few words around and not mentioning that you got the quote from a source. Indeed, these are examples of plagiarism.
However, this is not the only type of plagiarism that exists. A more common type of plagiarism occurs when a person reads something in a source and then takes an idea from the reading, incorporates that idea into a paper, and passes it off as his/her own idea. In this case, nothing is directly copied from one source into the person's paper. It is just the idea that is taken. And this is plagiarism! You must give credit to a source even when you are only borrowing ideas.
"What is Plagiarism?" video by Susan Wood
When writing a research paper, it is especially useful to remember that plagiarism is defined as any of the following:
failing to cite quotations and borrowed ideas
failing to enclose borrowed language in quotation marks
failing to put summaries and paraphrases in your own words.
If you follow the MLA format guidelines, and indicate your sources in both the essay and the works cited, you are well on your way to avoiding plagiarism.
After reading through the information and viewing the videos on summary, paraphrase, and quoting; MLA format; and Avoiding Plagiarism, please take the Writing Using Sources quiz. Details are in the "Activities" section below.
These are the activities that you need to complete this week. All activities are due by 11:55 p.m. on their due dates.
Information Literacy Exam. Read through the tutorial and follow the instructions for taking the exam online. 72% is considered passing. If you do not score 72% or higher, please retake the exam.
Due by xx/xx.
Points: 30
Writing Using Sources Quiz. Read through the written information and watch the videos on summary, paraphrase, and quoting; MLA format; and Avoiding Plagiarism prior to taking this quiz.
Due by xx/xx.
Points: 50