Writing week nine

Originality reports and evaluating information

Discussion

From the work that we've done so far, discuss in groups:

What's the difference between effective paraphrasing and plagiarism?
The diagram on the right illustrates how we need to try to balance our academic work. What would be good advice for someone about to start an written assignment? What should they do first?
How do universities check that the work was written by the student?

Task one

Watch the video clip from Oxford Brookes University on interpreting Turnitin reports, and discuss the following questions:

What is Turnitin, and how can it be useful for students/teachers?
What is a similarity score?
What does the highlighted text refer to? When is it ok and when would it be a problem?
When is it important to use quotation marks?
When the lecturer discusses the Mintel Report at approx 4 mins, she uses phrases like word for word and verbatim. What do these terms mean?
What examples does she give of poor paraphrasing?

Task two

Look at the following samples from students' Turnitin reports. Which ones would count as acceptable, poor academic practice, and plagiarism? What advice would you give to the students?

1

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5

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Evaluating reliability

How reliable is the source you're reading? In the reading class in week five we looked at some of the UK news outlets and compared which ones were more trustworthy. As you'll recall, publications like The Sun and The Star are classed as newspapers, but are at the bottom end of the tabloid market which mainly focusses on sex, scandals, sensations and many other things that start with s. As such, reliability of information is not their selling point. If you made a claim in an essay for which your only support was a story in The Sun, it is unlikely it would be taken seriously by your lecturer.

Similarly, we need to appraise the reliability of any source of information. We do this by asking basic questions such as:

Who wrote this?
Do I have any evidence that whoever it is knows what they're talking about?
What kind of site is the information from? Who hosts it, what's its reputation, and do the things they publish go through any kind of editorial/fact checking process?
Why was it written? A lot of online information is designed to prompt outrage because it is more likely to be shared between users (Crockett, 2017). As such, anonymous news and information is prone to being exaggerated, or often made up completely.
Is it based on evidence, such as a specific research study, or is the author just saying what they feel?

Task three

Explore some of the websites and decide whether or not they would be credible sources for an piece of academic writing or a presentation.

Crockett, M. J. (2017). Moral outrage in the digital age. Nature Human Behaviour 22. [Online]. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0213-3 [Accessed 28 August 2019].

Task four

Complete the overview of academic sources from the university library, and watch the video. Then discuss in groups:

What does it mean for something to be 'peer-reviewed', and why is this kind of publication more valuable when writing assignments?
What's the best way of finding peer-reviewed material?
Why is typing your essay question into Google not a good way of researching your assignment?

Task five - submitting a text to Turnitin

Choose an article from one of the more reliable sources we've discussed above. A short and simple article is best for the purposes of this activity, so a news story from one of the more trustworthy news outlets is also fine.
Once you've read the article and understood its main point, write a short paragraph summarising its content. Remember all the paraphrasing strategies we've covered so far.
When you've finished the paragraph (it doesn't have to be perfect!), we're going to go through the process of uploading it to Turnitin via the VLE as you'll do for your assignments. Make sure you are logged in first, and then follow the instructions on screen.
Finally, open your similarity report and compare in groups. Have you paraphrased effectively?

Teacher's notes

Independent study

For next class, complete the evaluating information page on the library's Skills Guide website. Please also read the Academic Sources section of the page.
If you're already familiar with peer review and would like to read a critique of the process, read this blog post (also accessible via the academic skills site) and come to the next class prepared to explain to your group about some of the problems with peer review.

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