Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sometimes in your research you will come across a passage that makes a point so eloquently that you
can’t imagine saying it any other way. There’s nothing wrong with copying such statements in your
writing, but be careful how you do it. Just adding a citation to the source is not enough; you must also put
the copied language in quotation marks. Without quotation marks, you are giving the reader the
impression that you wrote the passage yourself.
Even if you remember to insert quotation marks around any copied passage of 15 words or more, you can
still commit plagiarism if you rely on someone else’s words or ideas without giving that person credit.
For example, assume you are writing a paper about the American legal system, and you come across a
web site with the following passage: “In the American legal system, litigants are generally responsible for
paying their own attorney’s fees, regardless of the outcome of the case. This means that people who can’t
afford to hire a lawyer may effectively be denied access to justice.”
In your paper, you write, “People who don’t have enough money to hire lawyers are effectively denied
access to justice in America, since litigants are generally required to pay their own lawyers no matter
which side wins the case.”
You have successfully paraphrased the original sentence, so no quotation marks are needed. But you still
need to include a citation to the original source, to make it clear to the reader that this is not your own
personal insight, but rather an observation made by someone else.
When doing research on the Internet, it is easy to get into the habit of cutting and pasting snippets of
useful information into a text document, and then using that document as the basis for writing your first
draft. This is very dangerous, as you can inadvertently mix up your original writing with material that has
been copied.
If you must cut and paste, be scrupulous about putting any copied material in quotation marks and clearly
indicating the source.
Even better, put any text you have cut and pasted into a different color or font than your own original
writing, so that you can easily see what is yours and what is someone else’s.
Even when you’re just writing a rough draft, it’s a good idea to insert footnotes — at least one per
paragraph, and ideally even more.
The purpose of these footnotes is not to provide perfectly formatted citation information — you can wait to
do that until later — but rather to provide enough basic information to remind you of the sources you have
used. At this stage, don’t use terms like “id.” or “ibid.” for referring to previous citations; instead, insert the
name of the sources in each footnote, so that you will remember where the material came from even if
you later move your sentences around.
4. These texts may even express values and ideas that will persuade readers to view the world
differently. Nonetheless, if the text is not entertaining, readers are unlikely to find enlightenment
or be moved by such a text. Therefore, the primary purpose of any text, poem, play is to
entertain readers
5. Writing a book review prepares one in analyzing scholarly texts. When writing a book
review, one develops his/her critical thinking and it also sharpens them. It is a way in
improving the descriptive, analytical, and critical thinking skills of the students
6. giving due credits to the author or writer of the original work is important when citing
published work because it gives credit to the original author and their work for the ideas
you found to be useful, and in giving them credit it helps you avoid unintentionally
plagiarizing their work.
7. Writing to learn means using writing as a tool to promote content learning; when
students write they think on paper. Content teachers assign writing activities to help
students learn subject matter, clarify and organize their thoughts, and improve their
retention of content. Writing to learn is a way to provide students with opportunities to
recall, clarify, and question what they know and would like to know about a subject.
8. Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between
similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience’s interpretation of the
text. It is very important for it leads to a much richer reading experience which invites new
interpretations as it brings another context, idea, story into the text at hand. It also provides one
way for students to compose their own texts drawn from their knowledge of others.
9. Research will help us to generate useful information or knowledge which can be used for solving
social problems. There is no point of conducting research if it is not generating new knowledge on
particular issues or problems.