20.7: Taking Notes and Avoiding Plagiarism

Once you have found your sources, you will want to read them carefully and take notes to remember the information you want to include in your essay. You never want to move directly from the source to your outline or draft. The important step of taking notes is when real learning happens. 

• As you begin to understand your topic deeply and find the answer to your research question, you must write down the ideas in an organized way, keeping in mind where the information belongs in the essay.
• Never cut and paste ideas into your essay: this is plagiarism. 
• You must think metacognitively to make decisions about what information is relevant in answering your research question.

Once you comprehend the main idea or an important point from the source, you must determine how it helps answer your research question.

Resources for Citation

If you struggle with citation, there are several credible, helpful resources you can use to improve in this area. As we have already noted, Noodletools can help you to keep track of your sources and source notes, but it can also help you to create citations or import auto-generated citations from the databases. While you can use general sites like Citation Machine or EasyBib, these sites do not play as nicely with the databases, so it may take more effort to collect all of your citations in one place if you rely on them.

For general information about citations, many instructors suggest the Purdue Online Writing Lab, as it features many clear examples and explanations to help students understand both MLA and APA style. You can also use Butler’s Online Writing Lab for more specific, individual help with your citation and formatting leading up to paper deadlines.

Avoiding Plagiarism

As your instructor has likely discussed with you, either verbally or via written syllabus policies, plagiarism describes the act of presenting another person’s ideas as your own, and engaging in this act can result in serious consequences, ranging from failing an assignment to failing a class (or, in extreme cases, being expelled from a school altogether). While most students complete their own work without intending any kind of deliberate subterfuge, plagiarism can take many forms, some of which are considered intentional and others of which are considered unintentional. Intentional plagiarism refers to the kind of explicit duplicity you are likely to imagine when the topic arises: a student copying someone else’s work entirely or buying a paper online are classic examples, but this also can include more subtle techniques like patchwriting—splicing together your own wording with another author’s without proper attribution. Unintentional plagiarism, on the other hand, is more nuanced: forgetting in-text citations or Works Cited entries is the most common manifestation of this problem, and while it may be accidental, it is still a serious problem as it prevents readers from understanding the boundary between your ideas and those from your sources.

To avoid plagiarism, be sure to offer citations each time you quote, paraphrase, or summarize ideas that are not your own; while it is possible to over-cite (say, in the case of information considered common knowledge), over-citing is always preferable to under-citing. When paraphrasing, make sure you put aside the text to ensure that you are truly putting an author’s ideas into your own words based on your understanding of their message. When quoting, always incorporate quotation marks to clearly indicate where a direct quote begins and ends.

Exercise 20.7: Identifying Plagiarism

Determine whether each scenario below represents an act of plagiarism; then, decide whether the acts of plagiarism would be considered intentional or unintentional.

1. You have a paper due tomorrow, and you are not feeling confident about your writing. You ask your sister, an English major, for help, and she improves the paper by rewriting several sections of it.
2. You took Biology last semester, but due to a few unlucky breaks, you failed the course. When you retake the course this semester, you turn in the exact same papers again.
3. A few days before your paper is due in Comp 1, you submit a draft to the Online Writing Lab. You receive feedback that suggests you need to sharpen your thesis and topic sentences, so you make those changes and submit the final draft afterward.
4. You complete your final draft of your U.S. History 1 term paper at the last-minute, and you leave out several in-text citations. You do have a Works Cited page, but it does not include all of the sources referenced within the paper.