Blog Post 7

I chose to read Chapter 7, “Integrating & Documenting Sources”. Specifically in this chapter I read the plagiarism section. In this section it provides information on what is plagiarism, how not to do this in your paper, and helpful hints to avoid it. Plagiarism is when you copy another person’s work without giving credit or citing the source. If you are taking exact language from a source, you must quote it and properly cite it. If you summarize or paraphrase a source, you do not put quotes, but simply cite it. This chapter gave a lot of helpful hints to avoid plagiarism that I plan to incorporate when I am writing Project 2. If you do not know how to paraphrase or cite a source it suggests visiting the writing center. Also, it says if you do not know whether or not you should cite a source you should just cite anyway. I never thought about this but a good point made in this book is that you are more likely to conduct plagiarism if you are rushing to finish the assignment. The most important tip I got from this section was that when you are taking notes for your research you should cite or record the information down and if you steal exact lines to quote it in your notes so that you do not forget later.