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What's Citation For?
Introduction
| A Situational Definition of
Plagiarism | What's Citation For? | How
Do I Know When I'm in Trouble?
How Do I Protect Myself?
| Why Shouldn't I Cheat?
By this point in your education, you've surely been told many times by
your writing teachers that it is important to refer to the text and to
"cite your sources" in your essays. But, why should you do this?
When the answer to this question isn't clearly stated, the requirement
that you "cite the text" can seem nothing more than a mechanism
for determining whether or not you've done the reading. That's one way
to use citations in your writing: to prove you've done your homework.
We think there are better ways to fill your time, though.
So, if not just to prove that you've done your homework, why should
you cite the assigned readings? We believe that reading and writing are
valuable insofar as they help you to better understand your own thoughts
and your own ways of thinking. Thus, we ask that you think of your essays
as a place to show what you can do with what you've read. OF course,
when you cite in your essays, you can use the material to support your
argument, but we also invite you to consider using the readings you cite
to help you think new thoughts, to take the discussion in a new direction,
to challenge or complicate your argument, or even to demonstrate the depth
of your own understanding or your powers of analysis.
We provide you with a number of resources on this web site to help you
master all of these different ways of using the material you cite.
In Week Six of the Tutorama, Making
the Best Use of the Assigned Readings, you will find suggestions about
how to move from marking up the readings to writing papers that build
on your own observations.
In Week Seven of the Tutorama, What
to Do When You Quote, you will find specific suggestions about ways
to use what you cite in your papers.
In Week Ten of the Tutorama, Asking
the Questions that Matter, and Week Eleven, Asking
Follow-up Questions, you will find specific suggestions about what
to do after you've cited a passage in your papers.
Citation is an opportunity for you to demonstrate what you can do with
the words of others. Showing that you have mastered the appropriate conventions
for citation is only one part of this demonstration. Of course, you want
to show not only that you know where to put the quotation marks and the
parentheses, but this is largely a mechanical matter. More importantly,
you want to show that you can work with difficult passages, that you can
make productive connections, that you can get the texts to work for you
in ways that move your thoughts in directions that you find interesting
and promising. That's what citation's for: it brings another voice into
the conversation, a voice that does more than support what you would have
said anyway, a voice that questions, prods the discussion on, opens the
issue up over and over again.
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How Do I Know When I'm in Trouble?
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