You need documentation skills to bring other people’s ideas and words into your essay.
First, we use a language of attribution to indicate another voice in our essay. We use common phrases for that, including “According to Pariser” or “Pariser argues that …”.
Second, we use in-text citation to tell the reader what specific source the ideas and words come from. In-text citation in APA includes the author’s family name and the year of publication.
Locating Items in a Paragraph (Practice)
Read over the following paragraph which brings together ideas on plagiarism from two different authors – McLean and Horkoff.
Locating Items in a Paragraph (Sample Answers)
- Attribution language helps us prepare for who’s voice we are reading, and helps us know when we’ve moved from one voice to another. We should always know whose ideas we are reading.
- It’s possible to vary how the in-text citation is used for style, as long as the author’s name and year of publication are included somewhere.
- Most of the paragraph consists of ideas from McLean and Horkoff written in the writer’s own words, except this one direct quote of a key term.
- Explains that the writer’s work here is to bring together these two different ideas on plagiarism to compare them. It’s ok that most of the ideas in the paragraph belong to other people.
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