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IN-TEXT DOCUMENTATION Brief documentation in a text that tells readers what the writer has taken from a source and where in the source they found that information. PART 4 RESEARCH / FIND OUT Chapter 18 Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing TO QUOTE? TO PARAPHRASE? OR SUMMARIZE? THAT IS THE QUESTION. -CAROLE CLARK PAPPER Good researchers are part detective, part explorer.

Their sources provide clues and point to new leads; they identify new directions that delve deeper and deeper into knowledge about the topic of research. But researchers are also part conductor, gathering sources, bringing them together to make beautiful music-not in a symphony but in a compelling, eye-opening research project.

As the conductor, you are in charge of your project-the one who discovers a new way of looking at your topic, who decides what conclusions can be drawn from the evidence you consider, who moves from a challenging research question to a thorough exploration of the question and its implications, and eventually to staking your claim, developing a thesis and supporting it.

And just as an orchestra's conductor decides when to bring in the string section or turn to a flute solo, so you decide when to bring in your sources for greatest effect. The sources you bring in act like supporting players or voices, highlighting and accenting the points you are making but without drowning out or overpowering your own voice.

In most instances, you will bring these supporting voices in with a quotation (the precise words of a source, enclosed in quotation marks), a paraphrase (ideas in a passage from a source, in your own words), or a summary (a brief statement of a source's major points). A way to establish your authority Bringing the ideas and voices of others into your writing shows that you understand the context surrounding your topic, that you know what others have said about it and the varying perspectives they bring.

In other words, it helps build your credibility and trustworthiness to write on the topic: you know what you're talking about and are now a part of the conversation. And finally, judicious quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing allow you to be the conductor, to direct the action in your research essay to the desired end.

Quote If an idea is so important and powerfully stated that rewording it might weaken or distort it When it's a passage you intend to analyze To call attention to the author's expertise in order to help establish your own credibility To make sure you are presenting a source fairly and accurately, especially if it's one you do not agree with Paraphrase When the precise words aren't important, but there's a point or some details you want to include If the language will be hard for your audience to understand Summarize A lengthy passage when the point is important but the details are not QUOTING Quoting someone's exact words helps ensure that you're representing their ideas accurately.

By quoting sources directly, you show that you're being careful and respectful, letting those you quote speak for themselves rather than interpreting what they say. Be sure to use the exact words of your source, and to enclose them in quotation marks. And make sure to frame the quotation by introducing it and then explaining how it relates to your point. Enclose short quotations in quotation marks within your text. If you're following MLA style, short quotations should be no longer than four typed lines.

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big Short , says in the Afterword to his 2002 book Next: The Future Just Happened that he began writing this book after the Internet had become a commercial joke. In raising his voice in opposition to that view, Lewis felt he was being ridiculously brave, though in retrospect neither he nor those whose views he was challenging seem to have gotten the Internet's significance right ( Next 237).

Today, eighteen years after Lewis's book came out, theorists and pundits are still trying to determine that significance. In this example, the short quotations are incorporated into the sentences of the text. Set off long quotations as BLOCK QUOTATIONS , indented from the left margin. No need to enclose them in quotation marks, but you do need to indent them five spaces (or one-half inch), either MLA or APA style. What counts as long varies: it's more than four lines for MLA or forty words for APA .

The following example is in APA style. Here is Berkeley professor Jabari Mahiri using a block quotation in a study of the language used by high school coaches and their players: As one technique for focusing on players' accomplishments and improvements, coaches gave extended turns of praise both to the team as a whole and to individual players, as when coach LeRoy Crowe pulled a player to the side after a game to say: You played a good game out there my man. You know that?

People weren't recognizing what you were doing, but the coaches saw what you were doing. You were playin' that point guard position. You were looking down low. You hit Kendall with a nice pass down there. You remember that pass he scooped up? You weren't hitting your free throws. But, I mean, we recognized that you stayed under control.

(p. 34) -JABARI MAHIRI, Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools In this passage, Mahiri uses a long quotation to let coach Crowe speak for himself, providing an example of the kind of coach-player interaction Mahiri is studying. Note too that the parenthetical documentation comes after the period at the end of the quotation. Quoting poetry You can quote up to three lines of poetry in your text, enclosed within quotation marks.

Separate lines with slashes, leaving one space on either side of the slash. Appointed in 2019, Joy Harjo, a member of Mvskoke/Creek Nation, is the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In Remember, a poem about what is most important to remember in one's life, she encourages readers to Remember you are all people and all people are you. / Remember you are this universe and this universe is you (9-10). Here Harjo suggests that our memories should encode our common humanity.

If you're quoting four or more lines of poetry, set them off in a BLOCK QUOTATION , indented five spaces from the left margin. Set the lines as they appear in the original poem. Alas rhetoric can be used for harmful purposes: to humiliate and belittle, to confuse and distract, to distort and mislead.

In W. B. Yeats's haunting words, written amidst the horrors of the great war in 1919: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. (3-8) Today it may well seem that the worst among us are the ones whose passionate intensity is being heard.

But giving in to that vision would mean giving up on rhetoric as ethical communication. And that we cannot do. Changing a quotation to fit into your text Put ELLIPSES in places where you omit words from a quotation because they're unnecessary for your point. Use three dots with a space before each one and after the last dot. If, however, you omit an entire sentence or more, add a period before the ellipses.

In 1879, the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain wrote one of the few nineteenth-century grammars to approve of singular they . . . declaring, When both genders are implied, it is allowable to use the plural. . . . Grammarians frequently call this construction an error, not reflecting that it is equally an error to apply his to feminine subjects.

The best writers furnish examples of the use of the plural as a mode of getting out of the difficulty. Put brackets around any words that you insert in a quotation to make it fit grammatically into your text, or that you add to clarify something that might otherwise be unclear.

In 1885, the linguist Fred Newton Scott observed that pretty much everyone used the singular they , both people who care about good grammar, and those who don't, noting, The word they is being used as a [common gender] pronoun every day by millions of persons who are not particular about their language, and every other day by several thousands who are particular. (qtd. in Baron 167). -DENNIS BARON, What's Your Pronoun?

Punctuating quotations When a quotation is followed by other punctuation, that punctuation goes inside the final quotation mark in some cases and outside in others. Following are some guidelines on where it goes: Commas and periods go inside the closing quotation marks, except when there's in-text documentation-in that case, the documentation goes after the closing quotation mark, and the end punctuation that's part of your sentence goes after the parentheses.

Chelsea's mother-in-law is disappointed that she is still working. A mother's place is in the home, she says to Chelsea. Your kids will be ruined. -JOEY FRANKLIN, Working at Wendy's Nothing in my education had provided me with strategies for resisting certain versions of whiteness that may privilege me but oppress others. I state this lack and unearned privilege . . . simply because I want to make them visible.

For only by visualizing this privilege and incorporating it into discourse can people of good faith combat discrimination in ways that prevent their doing more harm than good (Wildman and Davis 660, 661). -KRISTA RATCLIFFE, Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness Exclamation points and question marks go inside closing quotation marks if they are part of the quoted text.

But they go outside the closing quotation marks if they are a part of the sentence you're writing, not a part of the quotation. And if there's any parenthetical documentation, it goes after the closing quotation mark-and the end punctuation that's part of your sentence goes after the parentheses.

Noting that most people are more likely to cheat on their taxes if they believe others are not paying a fair share of what they earn, Rene Chun asks So why are Americans still paying? One answer-that taxpayers now have to list a Social Security number for every dependent-has meant that the number of dependents nationwide shrank by millions. It's worth noting, however, that some of the disappeared had names like Fluffy! Colons and semicolons always go outside the closing quotation marks.

Despite deep IRS budget cuts, Chun says, most Americans still pay their income taxes every year; indeed, he goes on to say that most of us feel obliged to pay (Why Americans, par. 7.). Parenthetical documentation goes after the quotation mark-and put any end punctuation that's part of your sentence after the parentheses.

The restaurant became the place where Rosie studied human behavior, puzzling over the problems of her regular customers and refining her ability to deal with people in a difficult world. She took pride in being among the public, she'd say. There isn't a day that goes by in the restaurant that you don't learn something (451). -MIKE ROSE, Blue-Collar Brilliance. See p. 345 (MLA) and p. 388 (APA) on punctuating parenthetical documentation with long quotations.

Explaining how a quotation relates to your point When you insert a quotation into a text you're writing, you need to explain what it means and how it relates to what you are saying. If you were writing an essay about how race affects college admissions, for instance, here's something you might quote-and how you'd explain it. Educators are now beginning to understand the degree to which schools operate on the basis of contradictory principles.

Professor Carmen Kynard has pointed out that American colleges and universities have often practiced exclusionary policies while claiming to do the opposite, a move Kynard's grandmother referred to as runnin with the rabbits but huntin with the dogs (19). Such contradictions, in other words, are anything but accidental. Glossary MLA STYLE, 305-56 A system of DOCUMENTATION established by the Modern Language Association and used in the humanities.

APA STYLE, 357-403 A system of DOCUMENTATION used in the social sciences. APA stands for the American Psychological Association. BLOCK QUOTATION, 286, 287 In a written work, long QUOTATIONS are indented and set without quotation marks: in MLA STYLE , set off text of more than four typed lines, indented five spaces (or one-half inch) from the left margin; in APA STYLE , set off quotes of forty or more words, indented five spaces (or one-half inch) from the left margin.

See also QUOTE BLOCK QUOTATION, 286, 287 In a written work, long QUOTATIONS are indented and set without quotation marks: in MLA STYLE , set off text of more than four typed lines, indented five spaces (or one-half inch) from the left margin; in APA STYLE , set off quotes of forty or more words, indented five spaces (or one-half inch) from the left margin. See also QUOTE MLA STYLE, 305-56 A system of DOCUMENTATION established by the Modern Language Association and used in the humanities.

APA STYLE, 357-403 A system of DOCUMENTATION used in the social sciences. APA stands for the American Psychological Association. ELLIPSES, 288 Three spaced dots ( . . . ) that indicate an omission or a pause. PARAPHRASING When you paraphrase, you restate information from a source in your own words and your own sentence structures. Paraphrase when there are ideas you want to convey but the original wording is not important.

Be careful not to use the same words or structures, which could be seen as plagiarism-and make sure that you represent the original text accurately. A good paraphrase demonstrates that you have read the source carefully-and that you understand what it means! And even though you're using your own words, be sure to acknowledge where the ideas came from by naming the author and including parenthetical documentation.

Here's a paragraph from an article in The Atlantic , followed by two possible paraphrases: For 23 years starting in 1885, Belgium's King Leopold II was the proprietor, as he called himself, of the misnamed Congo Free State, the territory that today is the Democratic Republic of Congo. Exasperated by the declining power of European monarchs, Leopold wanted a place where he could reign supreme, unencumbered by voters or a parliament, and in the Congo he got it.

He made a fortune from his privately owned colony-well over $1.1 billion in today's dollars-chiefly by enslaving much of its male population as laborers to tap wild rubber vines. The king's soldiers would march into village after village and hold the women hostage, in order to force the men to go deep into the rain forest for weeks at a time to gather wild rubber. Hunting, fishing, and the cultivation of crops were all disrupted, and the army seized much of what food was left.

The birth rate plummeted and, weakened by hunger, people succumbed to diseases they might otherwise have survived. Demographers estimate that the Congo's population may have been slashed by as much as half, or some 10 million people. -ADAM HOCHSCHILD, When Museums Have Ugly Pasts UNACCEPTABLE PARAPHRASE In 1895, Belgium's King Leopold II was the owner of what he called the Congo Free State, the country that's now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Granting himself total power, he made a fortune by enslaving most of the male population, destroying the traditional way of life, decimating the birth rate, and leading to the death of some 10 million people.

This paraphrase fails to acknowledge the author or document the source and borrows too much from the original syntax and wording, using some of it word for word and other parts barely changed: In 1895, Belgium's King Leopold II, by enslaving most of the male population. It also misrepresents the original, saying that 10 million people died; the original says that the population may have declined by that number, but some of that decline would have been likely because the birth rate plummeted. ACCEPTABLE PARAPHRASE According to historian Adam Hochschild, Belgium's King Leopold II was once the self-proclaimed owner of the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

From 1885 to 1908, he exercised total control over the Congolese people, amassing a personal fortune mostly by forcing most of the male population into the rain forest to harvest wild rubber. This policy disrupted the traditional means of food production, which led to hunger, disease, and a declining birthrate. All told, that resulted in a steep decline in the Congo's population-by 10 million people, according to some estimates (When Museums).

This paraphrase captures the main points of the passage without relying on the original wording or sentence structures-and it identifies the author and provides parenthetical documentation to the source. SUMMARIZING A summary captures a source's main ideas concisely, and in your own words. Unlike a paraphrase, it leaves out the details. Your goal is to provide just enough information to sum up the point you are summarizing.

When you're summarizing a source to cite in your own writing, you'll want to make it as brief as possible-maybe only a sentence or two. As with a quotation or paraphrase, you'll need to credit the author and provide parenthetical documentation.

Here's a summary of the Adam Hochschild paragraph from page 291 : From 1885 to 1908, Belgium's King Leopold II claimed ownership and total control of today's Democratic Republic of Congo, disrupting the people's traditional way of life and giving rise to hunger, disease, and the death of millions of people (Hochschild). REFLECT! Look at the passage on page 286 in which Jabari Mahiri quotes Coach LeRoy Crowe. Try your hand at summarizing and paraphrasing what Coach Crowe said.

Then compare these with the direct quotation, and write a paragraph about why you think Mahiri chose to quote rather than summarize or paraphrase. INCORPORATING SOURCE MATERIALS Whether you quote, paraphrase, or summarize a source, you need to introduce it with a signal phrase and explain how the information you're citing contributes to your own ideas.

Use SIGNAL PHRASES to introduce source materials, identifying the author and saying something about their credentials if need be: New Mexico writer and teacher Andrew Schmookler said he cringes when grammar rules are broken. Yet he also proposed het , hes , hem as a new gender-neutral pronoun, arguing , Language is ours to make. (This is not France!) . . . Power to the people (241).

Note the two signal verbs in this example: said to simply report what he said, but arguing to note something he was advocating. While you can always use a neutral verb like say or think , it's better to choose a verb that reflects the speaker's STANCE . For example: Erma Bombeck urges us to Seize the moment, reminding us to Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart ( Forever Emma 56).

We could have written that Bombeck says to seize the moment, but we think that urges is more dynamic, fun-and accurate. And while signal phrases often come first in a sentence, putting them in the middle or at the end of a sentence works as well-and is a way of adding variety to our writing. How about those Chiefs! Andy Reid shouted from the podium after the Kansas City Chiefs won the 2020 Superbowl. Pat Mahomes and all of his boys, our defense taking care of business.

The coaches, man, a great job of keeping things right at the right time. It was a beautiful thing. Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant, advised Berkshire Hathaway vice chair Charlie Munger (101).

SOME USEFUL SIGNAL VERBS a c k n o w l e d g e c o n c l u d e o b s e r v e a d d c o n t e n d p o i n t o u t a d v o c a t e d e c l a r e r e f u t e a g r e e d e m a n d r e p o r t a r g u e d i s a g r e e r e s p o n d a s s e r t d i s p u t e s a y b e l i i m p s u g g e v e l y e s t c l a i m i n s i s t t h i n k c o m m e n t n o t e u r g e Verb tenses .

MLA style requires the present tense ( Beyonc asserts ) or present perfect ( Jay-Z has said ) in signal phrases that introduce source material-but the past tense ( in 2013 Pharrell urged us to clap along ) when you give the date when the source was written. APA recommends the past tense ( asserted ) or the present perfect ( has or have asserted )-but the present tense ( asserts ) when you're citing the implications of an experiment or findings that are generally agreed on. REFLECT!

Look over something you've written with an eye for how you've incorporated the words or ideas of others. Whether you've quoted, paraphrased, or summarized, think about why you chose that way-and then, try it a different way. Then look at your signal phrases: are there any more accurate or interesting verbs you might use? And where have you put the signal phrases? If they're all at the beginning of a sentence, try some in the middle or at the end.

Glossary STANCE, 17-19, 26-27 A writer's attitude toward the subject-for example, reasonable, neutral, angry, curious. Stance is conveyed through TONE and word choice. MLA STYLE, 305-56 A system of DOCUMENTATION established by the Modern Language Association and used in the humanities. APA STYLE, 357-403 A system of DOCUMENTATION used in the social sciences. APA stands for the American Psychological Association.

SIGNAL PHRASES, 293-94 Words used to attribute QUOTED, SUMMARIZED, or PARAPHRASED material to a source, as in according to X or Z claims . PART 4 RESEARCH / FIND OUT Chapter 19 Giving Credit, Using Sources Ethically THERE'S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN. -ECCLESIASTES 1:9 IF I HAVE SEEN FURTHER, IT IS BY STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS.

-SIR ISAAC NEWTON Today, when new and new and improved scream at us from every direction, it's worth wondering whether King Solomon got it wrong when he said there's nothing new under the sun. But if you stop and think about every new technology, every new idea, even every new story, you will soon find that they all build on earlier thinking, or earlier research. The iPhone was a new kind of phone, but it was by no means the first telephone.

Frozen was a new film in 2013, but its story is based on The Snow Queen, a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen that was first published in 1845. Just as Isaac Newton said, what's new is made possible only by standing on the shoulders of others. Think about how this applies to your own life: Can you even begin to trace all the ways you have been influenced by the words and ideas of others? Certainly you have already stood on the shoulders of a few giants.

The same is true of just about anything you write, especially when you write something that is based on research. And that's just one reason that you need to give credit to anyone whose words or ideas have informed your own. This chapter will help you know which sources you need to acknowledge-and how to use them ethically and without accidentally plagiarizing. Who owns words and ideas, anyway? In some cultures, words and ideas are shared, not owned by individuals.

In others, using another person's words or ideas is viewed as a compliment, a testimony to that person's wisdom that does not need to be acknowledged explicitly. Well into the Renaissance, in fact, you could own a pig or a cow or a bed-but you couldn't own words: Shakespeare borrowed right and left from prior sources without attribution and without restraint-indeed, that was part of his genius.

These laws increasingly gave rights of ownership of both words and ideas, as long as they were expressed in some medium, such as in writing or speech-and these laws form the basis for the documentation systems developed by groups such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) and used in schools and universities today. So what do intellectual property and copyright laws have to do with you?

It turns out that the answer is a lot-and not everyone is happy about this fact of academic life. Law professor Lawrence Lessig argues that such laws act as a deterrent to innovation by making it harder and harder for students and others today to use some words and images, especially those found on the internet.

In particular, Lessig points to what he calls the remix culture (in which existing works are changed or combined to produce something new) as a source of great creativity that is being choked by traditional copyright laws.

Lessig was, in fact, instrumental in expanding the notion of fair use and in creating an alternative system of attribution known as Creative Commons (CC), which offers copyright licenses anyone can use to mark their work with the freedoms they want it to carry. In 2019, this non-profit organization-whose motto is When we share, everyone wins-launched CC Search , a tool that lets you search for openly licensed and public domain works that anyone can use. Many but not all are available free of charge.

Check out the Creative Commons site at search.creativecommons.org/ . While Creative Commons and other open-source organizations are expanding the notion of fair use and providing alternative systems of attribution, and while the conventions surrounding documentation of sources will surely continue to evolve, at this moment it's still important to cite all sources you do not create yourself. And that means paying attention!

Uploading and downloading files, patching things together from various sites, cutting and pasting, jumping from one site to another and another: these everyday activities call for you to put on the brakes long enough to identify every source you intend to use and record its author or sponsor, along with where you got it. Why it's important to credit your sources While we don't routinely credit others in everyday conversation, it's important to do so in academic contexts.

Giving credit to others when it's due says a lot about your values, about your fairness and trustworthiness-in other words, it demonstrates your academic integrity. Acknowledging where some of your ideas come from also shows that you've done your homework, that you know what others have said about your topic and that you understand and have considered their points of view. In short, it helps to establish your own CREDIBILITY to write on the topic.

More than that, it shows you to be openhanded, crediting others for what you've gotten from them-and sharing the credit for what you yourself have written. In everyday conversation and speeches, we don't often credit those whose ideas have influenced our own. What sources do you need to document? You need to DOCUMENT most ideas, texts, images, and sounds that you CITE from other sources. But there are exceptions.

Sources you do not need to document Materials you've created or collected , such as photos you took or data you collected from a survey you conducted. Common knowledge : well-known events (the twin towers collapsed on 9/11), facts (nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11), uncontroversial information (many Americans were glued to their TVs on 9/11).

Well-known quotations : Yes we can, Houston, we have a problem. Information from public documents such as the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, and other such texts. Sources you do need to document Any materials you did not create yourself , including charts, tables, graphs, infographics, and images. And if you've created a chart or graph using data from another source, you need to acknowledge that source. Direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries .

The only exception is famous or widely known quotations, which do not need to be documented. Controversial information . If you cite something that's debatable, document it so that readers can check out the source for themselves. Anything you have a question about! If you're in doubt about whether or not to document a source, err on the side of caution and include formal documentation.

Asking for permission Fair use laws allow college students who are using material from copyrighted sources to use passages and images without getting permission from the author-as long as you are writing for educational purposes and provide full documentation. But here's the catch: if your writing will be posted online, where it can be seen by everyone, you need to have explicit permission from the copyright owner.

One student I know learned this lesson the hard way when an award-winning essay she wrote was posted on the award website. Within weeks, she heard from the author of a cartoon she'd included in her essay asking her to remove the essay from the web immediately and threatening legal action if she did not comply.

Another student whose essay was posted to a class website was shocked and embarrassed when his teacher received an angry email from a professor at another college, saying the student had used too much of her work in his essay-and that he had not documented it fully enough. So if in doubt, it's best to play it very safe and to get permission (in writing) for any source material that you post online.

Here is an example that will help you request permission: From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Request for permission Dear Professor Lunsford: I am writing to request permission to quote from your essay Teaching Writing in an Age of Misinformation and Lies. I am working on a presentation for my writing class on the proliferation of fake news and would like to use your definition to help clarify the subject.

My presentation will be posted to our class website and accessible to all. If you are willing to grant permission, I will give full credit to you and will provide complete documentation for the journal article in which it appeared, along with the URL of the site where I first discovered your work. Thank you very much for considering this request, Susanna Moller Remember to credit any collaborators!

If you have collaborated with others on your research or writing, be sure to credit and thank them either in a footnote at the bottom of a page or in an endnote on a separate page. See page 315 for how to format such notes in MLA style and pages 364-65 for how to do so in APA style. Avoiding plagiarism Presenting someone else's words or ideas as if they were your own and without giving credit is dishonest and unethical-and is considered plagiarism. It's a masquerade, with serious consequences.

Every year, students receive failing grades or are suspended from college for plagiarizing. Journalists, professors, and public figures have lost their positions or damaged their reputations when they've been caught using someone else's words without giving credit. Plagiarism is often intentional-witness the many online paper mills that guarantee an A for a certain price. But it is also easy to detect: even a quick Google search will often reveal the source! Often, however, it is unintentional.

Especially if you are writing about an unfamiliar topic, it can be tricky to incorporate the words or ideas of others (your sources) fairly and to acknowledge them sufficiently. Instead, you may do some of what Professor Rebecca Moore Howard calls PATCHWRITING , using material from sources in ways that stick too closely to the original wording or structure. In fact, I've made this kind of mistake myself, when I was in junior high and writing about my hero at the time, Albert Schweitzer.

With no internet to search and a very small school library, I had written to my state library asking for resources and was thrilled when a package of printed articles about Schweitzer arrived. I patched pieces of those articles into what I was writing, sometimes remembering to credit a source but often not. I felt very proud of my work.

Lucky for me, I had a teacher who took the time to show me how to integrate the sources into my writing, how to use quotation marks, and how to paraphrase without copying the original author's wording or syntax. Better yet, she explained why it was important to credit my sources-and how to do so. Lesson learned! As this example suggests, patchwriting can be a useful stage for learning how to work with sources: it certainly helped me learn a lot about Albert Schweitzer and his work.

And it was a stepping-stone on the path to becoming a confident researcher and to citing sources ethically. But some instructors will see patchwriting as plagiarism, even if it's documented. So it's something you'll want to avoid. Let's take a look at how it happens, and how you can weave the ideas of others into your own writing by using your own words and sentence structure. Imagine that you want to summarize the ideas from the following passage: In some professions, early decline is inescapable.

No one expects an Olympic athlete to remain competitive until age 60. But in many physically nondemanding occupations, we implicitly reject the inevitability of decline before very old age. Sure, our quads and hamstrings may weaken a little as we age. But as long as we retain our marbles, our quality of work as a writer, lawyer, executive, or entrepreneur should remain high up to the very end, right? Many people think so.

I recently met a man a bit older than I am who told me he planned to push it until the wheels come off. In effect, he planned to stay at the very top of his game by any means necessary, and then keel over. But the odds are he won't be able to. The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.

According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world's leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average. So if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that.

-ARTHUR C. BROOKS, Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: Here's How to Make the Most of It Suppose you wanted to make sure you remember the key information in this passage for a class discussion you are going to lead. You might be tempted to patch together a summary like this: PATCHWRITTEN SUMMARY Arthur C. Brooks explains that while many people believe they can stay at the top of their game well into their 60s and 70s and beyond, the odds are that these people are wrong.

Brooks refers to research conducted by Dean Keith Simonton, an expert on tracking creative careers who says that success usually occurs in the first 20 years after the beginning of a career, so at age 50 people who started out at 30 are hitting the time when they will start to decline. This summary captures the gist of Brooks's argument, but it uses far too much of Brooks's own language (stay at the top of their game, the odds are, in the first 20 years).

It's fine for studying, but not for writing a summary you'd submit to an instructor as your own work. Now take a look at another summary, one that captures the main idea in the student's own words and includes a direct quotation: ACCEPTABLE SUMMARY While some cling to the notion that their work level will remain high up to the very end, Arthur C. Brooks presents research that contradicts those beliefs (70).

In fact, this research reveals that high-level work performance begins to decline after about 20 years into a career. This summary relies on the writer's own language and sentence structure and uses quotation marks to enclose language taken directly from the source. It restates the main idea of the passage clearly and simply-and leaves out any details that won't be necessary for the writer's purposes.

For instance, it omits information about Brooks's sources, which won't be used in the essay the student is writing on attitudes toward aging in the workplace. Finally, he documents the page where he found the original passage. Avoiding plagiarism starts with taking meticulous notes and being very, very careful as you incorporate the words or ideas of others into your own writing.

For sources you intend to use, take down all the information you'll need for a list of works cited or references, make sure that paraphrases or summaries do not use any wording or sentence structures from the original, and enclose any words you may want to include in quotation marks. And if you have concerns about how to incorporate sources into your text, get advice from your instructor or a consultant in your school's writing center.

Joining the conversation ethically Remember: your words are the ones that count the most in what you say-they are your way of getting in on the conversation about subjects you care about, sharing what you have learned with others and listening hard to learn from them. You'll be citing sources for sure, but those sources should play second fiddle to you and the point you are making. Nevertheless, you want to give them all the credit they deserve.

That's how you become part of the larger conversation-ethically! REFLECT! Look at something you've written that relies on outside sources. Read it carefully, paying attention to how well you've integrated words or ideas from sources into your writing: how you introduced and explained them, how you credited their authors, and how they support what you say. How successfully have you used your sources, and what might you do differently next time?

Glossary CREDIBILITY, 164-66, 297-98 The sense of trustworthiness that a writer conveys through the text. DOCUMENTATION, 309-44, 360-86 Publication information about the sources cited in a text. IN-TEXT DOCUMENTATION usually appears in parentheses at the point where it's cited or in an endnote or a footnote. Complete documentation usually appears as a list of WORKS CITED or REFERENCES at the end of the text. Documentation styles vary by discipline.

See also APA STYLE ; MLA STYLE CITATION, 283-94 In a text, the act of giving information from a source, for example, by QUOTING , PARAPHRASING , or SUMMARIZING . A citation and its corresponding parenthetical DOCUMENTATION , footnote, or endnote provide minimal information about the source; complete information appears in a list of WORKS CITED or REFERENCES at the end of the text. MLA STYLE, 305-56 A system of DOCUMENTATION established by the Modern Language Association and used in the humanities.

APA STYLE, 357-403 A system of DOCUMENTATION used in the social sciences. APA stands for the American Psychological Association. PATCHWRITING, 301-3 PARAPHRASES that lean too heavily on the words or sentence structure of the original, adding or deleting some words, replacing words with SYNONYMS , altering the syntax slightly-in other words, not restating the passage in fresh language and structure.

PART 4 RESEARCH / FIND OUT Chapter 20 MLA Style DOCUMENTATION IS THE MEANS [OF RECORDING] SCHOLARLY CONVERSATIONS, AND THE SPECIFICS OF THOSE CONVERSATIONS MATTER. -KATHLEEN FITZPATRICK, MLA HANDBOOK What started out in 1951 as a 31-page style sheet for scholars submitting articles to the Modern Language Association's journal soon evolved into the MLA Handbook , now in its ninth edition.

MLA style, recommended or required by some disciplines in the humanities, calls for brief IN-TEXT DOCUMENTATION and complete documentation in a list of WORKS CITED at the end of the text. Such documentation is important: it gives credit where credit is due, enables your readers to find sources you have used, and shows that you have done your homework. This chapter provides templates and examples to help you document the many different sources you're likely to cite.

Glossary IN-TEXT DOCUMENTATION Brief documentation in a text that tells readers what the writer has taken from a source and where in the source they found that information. WORKS CITED, 315-44 The list of full bibliographic information for all the sources cited in the text, which appears at the end of a researched text prepared in MLA STYLE. A DIRECTORY TO MLA STYLE In-text documentation 309 1. Author named in a signal phrase 309 2. Author named in parentheses 310 3.

Two or more works by the same author 310 4. Authors with the same last name 310 5. Two or more authors 311 6. Organization or government as author 311 7. Author unknown 311 8. Literary works 311 9. Work in an anthology 312 10. Encyclopedia or dictionary 313 11. Legal documents 313 12. Sacred text 313 13. Multivolume work 313 14. Two or more works cited together 314 15. Source quoted in another source 314 16. Work without page numbers 314 17.

An entire work or a one-page article 315 Notes 315 List of works cited 316 CORE ELEMENTS 316 AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 322 1. One author 322 2. Two authors 322 3. Three or more authors 322 4. Two or more works by the same author 323 5. Author and editor or translator 323 6. No author or editor 323 7.

Organization or government as author 324 ARTICLES AND OTHER SHORT WORKS 324 Documentation Map: Article in a Print Journal 326 Documentation Map: Article in an Online Magazine 327 Documentation Map: Journal Article Accessed through a Database 329 8. Article in a journal 324 9. Article in a magazine 325 10. Article in a news publication 325 11. Article accessed through a database 328 12. Entry in a reference work 328 13. Editorial or op-ed 330 14. Letter to the editor 330 15. Review 331 16.

Comment on an online article 331 BOOKS AND PARTS OF BOOKS 331 Documentation Map: Print Book 333 17. Basic entries for a book 332 18. Anthology or edited collection 332 19. Work in an anthology 332 20. Multivolume work 334 21. Book in a series 334 22. Graphic narrative or comic book 335 23. Sacred text 335 24. Edition other than the first 335 25. Foreword, introduction, preface, or afterword 335 26. Published letter 336 27. Dissertation 336 WEBSITES 336 Documentation Map: Work on a Website 338 28.

Entire website 336 29. Work on a website 337 30. Blog entry 337 31. Wiki 337 PERSONAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA 339 32. Personal letter 339 33. Email or text message 339 34. Post to Twitter , Instagram , or other social media 339 AUDIO, VISUAL, AND other SOURCES 340 35. Advertisement 340 36. Art 340 37. Cartoon 341 38. Supreme Court case 341 39. Film 341 40. TV show episode 342 41. Online video 342 42. Presentation on Zoom or other virtual platform 343 43. Interview 343 44. Map 343 45.