One of the most important things I learned in high school was to cite absolutely everything. The greatest evil of IB was plagiarism and we were all terrified of being caught. We never lost the terror of submitting papers to Turnitin.com. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to take very careful, specific notes. I do all my note-taking in a marble composition notebook, so that I don't lose anything. I label which chapter each group of notes comes from, as well as what page. Sometimes I use a color coding method, especially if I'm looking for many different things. I almost never actually write full quotes; I use a lot of ellipsis because I'm too lazy to actually write down the entire quote. Also, when I take notes I almost never paraphrase. I only paraphrase when I'm actually writing the paper. This makes the research process move a little more quickly. When I utilize pictures, I either bookmark the page I pull the picture from for future reference, or, if the picture is from a book, make a note of what page the picture is on.
The best way to avoid plagiarism is to take careful notes according to what citation style is being used. I found the table comparing the different citation styles interesting. I hadn't ever thought about the reasoning behind each method, or why there are so many. Also, the correlation between MLA in-text citations and the work cited page was a major lightbulb moment.
So basically, Chapter 7 summed up in a sentence: Note carefully and note often to be able to create specific citations.
No comments:
Post a Comment