Hi Everyone,
I hope that you had a good Thanksgiving and are enjoying some time at home with your families. This week we are continuing to move forward with our Analytical Research Papers. Please make sure that you are up to date on the assignments. You should already have submitted your Research Proposal and placed a Preliminary Source List into your ENG2100 folder. The plan for this week is as follows:
- Office Hours: I will be holding extended office hours on Monday. You can sign-up for an appointment HERE. If all available slots fill up, feel free to sign up together with someone else. I am happy to meet with you in small groups.
- Drafts Due: Your first drafts are due on Wed. Dec. 1st. I suggest that as you take notes on your sources, you are already identifying sources you want to include in the body of your paper. Remember that each body paragraph should be organized around a single idea about your topic that you will be exploring in that paragraph, so make sure that you are beginning each body paragraph with a topic sentence that lays out that idea.. Please print out your draft on Wednesday and bring 3 hard copies of your draft with you to class.
- Reading:. Please take a look at the sections in Join the Conversation titled “Using Sources” (pp.167-182) and “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity” (pp.183-188). Think about how you can incorporate some of their suggestions into your research paper process. In a comment on this post, please share one piece of good advice you found in the reading. Do this by Friday, Dec. 3rd.
While reading the following sections, I believe patchwriting is something Key to look out for. “…stitching together material from Web or other sources without properly paraphrasing or summarizing and with little or no doc-umentation. ” (Howard, 179). I believe it is very important to site work as best as you can so you wont be dealing with plagiarism. Which is a very big deal in college.
The reading emphasizes on siting sources and giving the correct credit to those that deserve it. Anything that isn’t written by myself should be cited or referred back to, otherwise it is considered plagiarism and academic dishonesty. It is a very useful advice plus a friendly reminder that as I am writing my research paper to be very cautious what I am including and how I mention it.
citing*
One tip that I want to carry on with me while writing my essay is knowing when the right time to paraphrase, quote, or summarize is. I should quote when the exact words from a source are extremely important, paraphrase when I want to use a concept from an idea, and summarize when I only want to highlight the main idea from a text.
The “synthesizing information” part of this reading is important to think about. It’s easy to lose track of all of the information you gather while doing research. In the end, the sources and information need to back up the specific claims made.
The reading shows the importance of when you should use a quote and how to do it correctly so that it’s not considered plagiarism. it also talks about when to paraphrase when you just want to talk about the concept of the quote you had read. Its helpful to know this when writing my paper and to use in the future in other writing.
Advice taken away from the reading would be when quoting another writer a smoother transition would be to use signal words. Also to give back credit to the original writer if I ever add a quote into my own writing because if not that’s plagiarism and it’s almost disrespectful to the original writer and also academic dishonesty because it’s not your own original work.
In the article “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity” I learned how important it is to properly sight evidence. It also gave some techniques on how to properly paraphrase my main idea that I’m trying to portray. This was helpful to learn to properly do the up coming paper and to make sure I do not mess up.
In the article, Plagiarism and Academic Integrity”, one thing I learned was how to credit the Author. It explains how to quote something from a text without making it seem as if you’re stealing another persons writing. I feel like this helped me especially since I’m interviewing others for my research paper, I need it to be authentic as possible.
My takeaways was that it’s very important to synthesize your evidence. This means combining all evidence that supports and provides evidence for your argument and research. Another thing I found really helpful from this section was writing down summaries for every article, this allows you to determine which source or evidence you would like to include. This is also helpful to include in my research paper because it’ll provide the readers with more context.
Something that I can take out of the readings and use in my research paper would be to not just use one citation per paragraph and simply give a small detail but to deeply walk through it. In the reading it even states that the least effective academic papers are those who simply use one item per paragraph without getting through it into further detail. Like yeah we can give citations and talk about them but if we don’t go through the motions of it, our paper will go nowhere.
A piece of advice i was reminded of after reviewing both texts is that it is crucial to always site whatever is not your own. Sometimes i forget that even small fragemnts or phrases that i copied from somewhere still have to be cited or it can count as academic dishonesty. Therefore it is important to keep that in mind when writing a paper to always cite what is not your own even if it is a small piece of someones elses work.
A takeaway that I can learn from is to be able to quote the text that I will be using in my writing so I don’t plagiarize with intent. With the ability of quoting the text, I can use what the author is trying to tell the reader and further analyze the text to comprehend my writing further.
A few takeaways from the texts are when looking for sources you have to paraphrase, cite them to your own wording otherwise it’s considered plagiarism and academic dishonesty. Also placing quotation marks around the quotes you used that are from the original writer gives them credit. This is important because you could be plagiarizing without intentionally doing it in the writing.
One piece of advice I took from the text “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity”, is to make sure to include the whole citation and quote everything to prevent plagiarism.