Chapter 51 Summary

When researching you want to be a good record keeper whether its on paper or on your computer. You will need methods for maintaining a working bibliography, keeping track of source materials, and taking notes without plagiarizing. A working bibliography is when you compile the list of sources that will appear at the end of your paper. It will contain more sources than you will actually include in your list of works cited. Once you have written your bibliography you can annotate it by writing several brief sentences summarizing key points of a source will help you identify the source’s role in your paper.
A way to keep track of your sources is to photo copy, print them out or save them to a disk. These will help you because you save time in the library, high light key points or color code them to help with your outline. When you take notes and jot down ideas you need to be careful not to borrow language from you sources. Even if you half-copy the author’s sentences either by mixing the phrases with your own without quotation marks or by plugging your synonyms into the structure is considered plagiarism. You want to keep the source close to you so you can check for accuracy and don’t try and put ideas in your own words. There are three kinds of note taking: summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. Summaries should be in your own words and be shorter paragraphs. If you do use phrases from a source put quotation marks around it. Paraphrasing is like a summary but it retells the information in roughly the same number of words. When using the source again make sure to have quotation marks surrounding it so you will know which words aren’t yours.
Overall this chapter was helpful because these days we have so many more ways to get sources and to some people cut and paste is the way they do their papers. Without the internet I think we had to use our own words more and now days you type one word into the search engine and you get a ton of information. We need to go back to when I was in school and use our brains more from the knowledge we know and not how to take stuff from the internet and think it’s ours.