Incorporating Sources

Plagiarism and Paraphrase Revisited 

   Plagiarism, as we have discussed before, is defined as any uncredited use of another’s information or ideas, whether intentional or not.  This includes copying someone else’s words or interpretations without acknowledgement, copying or purchasing a paper and turning it in under your own name, using syntax or sentence structure from another source in paraphrase, or even careless failure to properly quote a source in order to distinguish that source’s words from your own. 

    Consider the following guidelines when preparing to paraphrase or quote material in your argument:

• Common knowledge information does not have to be documented.  As a rule of thumb, if at least three sources say essentially the same thing, the information would probably qualify as common knowledge.  Be sure however to consider what your audience is likely to know about the subject.
• Be faithful to the source.  Don’t make your source say things s/he didn’t say. 
• Integrate the information smoothly into your rough draft.
• Don’t quote only one or two words, as a rule, unless you are placing special emphasis.
• Quote memorable phrases or sentences.  If the words of your source are particularly powerful, let your source speak.
• When paraphrasing, try not to use the same words as your source, but don’t overdo it.  You do not have to change every word and end up with awkward or misleading word choices.

 Practice Exercises

1. Which of the following would have to be documented and why?
• The number of Baptist churches in the United States
• The date of the first “talking” movie
• Comments about The Grapes of Wrath in Steinbeck’s own letters
• The number of miles in a light year

2. Comment on the two different versions of the paragraph from Juliet B. Schor’s book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure.  New York: Basic, 1991.  The original text is below, followed by two paraphrases:

Original: In the last twenty years the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily.  Each year the change is small, amounting to about nine hours, or slightly more than one additional day of work.  In any given year, such a small increment has probably been imperceptible.  But the accumulated increase over two decades is substantial.  When surveyed, Americans report that they have only sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week, after the obligations of job and household are taken care of.  Working hours are already longer than they were forty years ago.  If present trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the nineteen twenties. 

Paraphrase A: Since 1971, the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has gone up.  The change is small, however.  Each year it amounts to nine hours, or the equivalent of one additional day at work.  Such a small increase doesn’t seem like much.  But the increase over twenty years is substantial.  When surveyed, Americans say they have only sixteen hours of leisure per week, after work at home and at the job are done.  Working hours today are already greater than they were in 1951.  If things continue this way, by the year 2000, Americans will be spending as much time at work as they did in 1920. 

Paraphrase B: Americans are spending every-increasing amounts of time at work, says economist Juliet B. Schor in The Overworked American, disputing the commonly held idea that work time is decreasing while leisure time is increasing.  She points out that though the increase in work time is small, amounting to about a day’s work a year, the increase year by year for twenty years is considerable.  According to survey results, Americans say they have only sixteen and a half hours of leisure time a week when paid work and work at home are excluded.  Schor concludes that we are working more now that we were in about 1950 and that if the trend continues, we’ll be working as much as we did in the 1920s.

3. Write a combination paraphrase-direct quotation of the following paragraph from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt-Harvest, 1927):

Let us define a plot.  We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence.  A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.  “The king died and then the queen died” is a story.  “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.  The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.  Or again: “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.”  This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.  It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow.  Consider the death of the queen.  If it is in a story we say “and then?”  If it is in a plot we ask “why?”  That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel.

Incorporating Documented Information

 Introducing Quotations

Susanne Langer responded, “The vulgarization of art is the surest symptom of ethic decline” (310). 

W.H. Auden remarked that “a culture is no better than its woods” (271)

Fitting Incorporated Material

• Introduce and indent long quotations:

Donna Haraway sees primatology as a narrative practice:

Primatology is about the life history of a taxonomic order that includes people.  Especially western people produce stories about primates while simultaneously telling stories about the relations of nature and culture, animal and human, body and mind, origin and future.  Indeed, from the start, in the mid-eighteenth century, the primate order has been built on tales about these dualisms and their scientific resolution. (Primate 5) 

• Brackets provide clarification of pronouns when the original context has been removed or provide identification for pre-existing errors:

The words of Thomas Jefferson offer us a philosophy for détente: “We must therefore . . . hold them [the British] as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in way, in peace friends.”

Teaching can be frustrating to the point that Mark Twain once described: “I’ll learn [sic] him or kill him.”

Henley’s poem “Invictus” reminds us that with self-determination we can be “the master[s] of [our] fate.”

• When you omit material from a quote, use an ellipsis (three spaced periods with a space before and after each point):

Susan B. Anthony inspires us to take action when she reminds us that “cautious, careful people . . . never can bring about reform.”

Understanding always takes place with reference to the future, a point on which Heidegger is quite explicit:

If the term “understanding” is taken in a way which is primordially existential, it means to be projecting towards a potentiality-for-Being for the sake of which any Dasein exists. . . . The future makes ontologically possible an entity which is in such a way that it exists understandingly in its potentiality-for-Being. (385; italics in original)

Credit where credit is due: Material adapted from Richard Charnigo, From Sources to Citation (Harper Collins), and Kathleen Bell, Developing Arguments (Wadsworth Publishing), by Dr. Michael Pinsky (who provided a couple of examples from his own writing).