Integrating Source Material with Your Ideas
When style guides want you to list sources at the end, they only want you to list the sources that you have actually cited in your work. It is not enough to have the required number of sources in the list of references at the end of your project. Instead, you must actually use those sources in the text. This means that the sources cannot simply be decoration.
You can use the instructions for checking citations as a technical way to check that you have referenced all of your sources, but beyond the technical necessity of having in-text citations for all of your sources, but more is involved in using sources well.
Quoting and Paraphrasing Successfully
Every time you use information from another source, you have to cite that material. But what else do you have to include? It depends on how many sources you are bringing together, but in general, you will need to have these elements:
- Some attribution for the source, usually in the form of an attribute tag and/or a citation
- The quotation itself (only if you are quoting; you don’t need this if you are just paraphrasing)
- A paraphrase of the text you are using
- A connection to your claim in the paragraph or in the paper as a whole
Attributive Tags and Citations
An attributive tag is usually a quick phrase that indicates who said the words you are quoting or where the information comes from. For example, you could begin your introduction of the source material with “Jones argues …,” or “According to the National Institutes of Health ….” This approach works best when you are using a single source.
However, sometimes, you don’t want to highlight the source, or you are following a style guide that only wants references to sources in citations. Citations can serve the same purpose in many circumstances, and they work particularly well when you are paraphrasing multiple sources.
Quotations and Paraphrases
If you are quoting, you need the quotation, obviously. Less obvious, however, is that you usually need a paraphrase even when you are quoting from a source—simply because your reader needs to understand how you understand the quotation you’ve selected. Sometimes, the quotation is so plain that a paraphrase is simply redundant, but more often, you need the paraphrase to point out what you think is important about the quotation.
It may seem easier to quote complete sentences, even if you need to write additional sentences of paraphrase. However, one way to increase the level of sophistication in your writing is to quote the bare minimum of what you need from the passage you have selected and to use a paraphrase to explain the idea behind the full passage. This mixture of paraphrase and quotation demonstrates very well your understanding of the material, and it shows your reader that you are working actively to explain what the original says.
Let’s look at an example of the kind of difference in sophistication level that I am talking about. Nikk Ogasa reported on