Welcome to Week 14 folks! You will begin this week with a study of plagiarism and integrating source material correctly. Although the topic of plagiarism might seem rather obvious or unworthy of detailed study, I would argue otherwise. In fact, students are often charged with plagiarism because they inappropriately paraphrase or summarize the words of others in research papers or fail to document their sources correctly in the body of their essay. Although inappropriate paraphrase and/or summary might lead to inadvertent or unintentional plagiarism, the academic community -- and your college instructors -- will recognize it as plagiarism nonetheless.

The key to avoiding unintentional plagiarism is actually very simple. Don’t look at the source while you are writing about it. Instead, read a section of the source, put the source away where you can’t see it, and then write a sentence or two paraphrasing what you just read in your own words. Repeat this process until you have a full summary of all the main ideas in the source. Then when you go to write your draft, you should just tell the story of your topic in your own words. Of course, you will want to add specific details or quotes from the sources that need to be cited, but your first draft should be written entirely in your own words based entirely on your memory of the information you learned during the research process. Again, the trick is to NOT look at the source as you write your paper.

I encourage you to work through this week's Course Lecture: Advanced Citation and Source Integration as well as the Plagiarism Lesson carefully so that you can avoid inadvertent plagiarism as you begin integrating well-chosen, supporting details from the required sources into your essay. Here’s another important tip: this week’s plagiarism quiz is a bit more difficult than you might think. To be successful on the quiz, make sure you carefully read the original source and then closely compare the sample paraphrase or quote in the quiz question to determine if the sample is plagiarized or not. Remember, just swapping out synonyms is not paraphrasing correctly. So even if the sample is cited correctly, if the sample sentence looks near identical to the original source with just a few words swapped out, that sample sentence is an example of plagiarism.

In addition to your work on plagiarism, you will also be completing your research on your chosen topic for Essay 2 by documenting, summarizing, and evaluating the relevancy and credibility of each source you have found. Your work on your Annotated Bibliography this week should include (at minimum) two objectives: (1) Completion of your Works Cited page (2) Preliminary selection of significant, supporting details from the five sources you are required to integrate into your research-based argument. An Annotated Bibliography requires you to cite, summarize, and evaluate each of your five sources. Thus, each entry on your annotated bibliography will include a paragraph summary of the source’s content and a few sentences explaining why the source is credible and how you might use it in your essay. Because we recognize that an Annotated Bibliography is a time consuming project, we have made this assignment due on Sunday night rather than our usual Friday night deadline. Finally, don’t forget that this annotated bibliography is a major writing assignment that is worth 5% of your overall course grade, so it has far more impact on your course grade than a normal weekly assignment.

Wishing you another successful week!