Text Education: Quoting and Citing Resources
Whenever you write about an academic subject, you are participating in an ongoing conversation of ideas. It is important that when you use ideas you learned from someone else you credit the original author. Citing resources shows you have intellectual integrity and are committed to honest participation in the conversation.
1. THE GOLDEN RULE: Any time you give information that is not common knowledge or that you learned from a specific source, you MUST cite the resource you got it from.
For information on citing resources, click here:
2. You should use quotes strategically throughout your paper. For the most part, you should only summarize information, and save quotes for when a resource has phrased information in a particularly succinct, entertaining, or revealing way.
When you use too many quotes, you are basically making other authors do your work for you. Your paper is supposed to written by you!
3. Always make a quote sandwich! Briefly introduce the quote beforehand, and then explain or paraphrase the quote in your own words afterward.
4. Avoid giving quotes their own sentence. Instead, you should introduce them briefly, thus incorporating them into a sentence of your own.
5. Quotes must be incorporated into grammatical sentences. When in doubt, read your writing out loud to see if you have accomplished this.
6. Avoid making quotes the first or last line of a paragraph. You should always begin and end paragraphs with your own words. Otherwise it will seem like you didn’t know how to incorporate the quote into your own ideas. (This rule admits of some exceptions.)