CITATIONS & PLAGIARISM

Now that you've amassed your research in a massive paper brain dump, got everything organized nicely enough that Martha Stewart would be jealous, and gone into way too much detail about each source than you wanted to, you might be wondering: Why exactly do I have to collect the author, publication date, page numbers, and publisher information for every single source? You might be thinking: 'Jeez, can't I just cut and paste the URL?' Well, young traveler, this is why you're gathering all that information: so that, when you're actually writing your paper, you can properly cite your sources.

Chances are that you've been forced to cite your sources once or twice in your glorious academic career. Some ambitious social studies teacher, or a picky Language Arts sub, decided that your essays had to have sources and citations and bibliographies and other stuff that makes you want to claw your eyeballs out.

Well, guess what? Citations aren't just weird and annoying little formatting tricks designed to drive you insane—they're really important parts of academic learning. It's like this: in the scientific world, an experiment is basically junk unless you can give specific directions that allow other people to replicate your results. If you tell the world that green fireworks attract UFOs, nobody will care if they can't try it for themselves. It's the same in non-scientific publishing. Citations are the notes that allow readers to find the source for each bit of knowledge in your book or article and trace it back to the original source.

Think of citations as a secret code that protects the integrity of all human knowledge. But learning this secret code will be way more satisfying than the one in A Christmas Story, I swear. So, kiddos, grab your decoder rings and get your invisible ink. We're about to learn the beautiful, complex, and maybe a little bit wacky secret language of academic writing.