Giving Credit to Your Sources: Using MLA Format to Cite Your Sources and Avoid PLAGIARISM!

1. Giving Credit to Your Sources:Using MLA Format to Cite Your Sources and Avoid PLAGIARISM! Adapted from a presentation of the Purdue University Writing Lab

2. Why Do I Cite My Sources? • Allows readers to find out where your information in your paper came from! • Gives you credibility as a writer—let’s people know that you are using good information and facts! • Protects yourself from plagiarism!!! (plagiarism means that you use someone’s words or ideas in your paper without giving them credit)

3. Avoiding Plagiarism • Proper citation of your sources can help you avoid plagiarism, which is a serious offense!! • Plagiarism may result in anything from failure of the assignment to expulsion from school!!

4. How do we give credit to our sources and avoid plagiarism? • Giving credit to your sources begins with keeping track of where you are getting your information when you take notes and collect information and facts for your research paper.

5. How do we give credit to our sources? • You make a list of all your sources called a Works Cited Page. • You use Citations within your paper every time you use information you collected from a source.

6. Works Cited Page • A list of every source that you make reference to in your essay. • This goes at the end of your paper. • Provides the information necessary for a reader to locate any sources cited in your essay.

7. A Sample Works Cited Page • Smith 12 • Works Cited • Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1852-1853. New York: Penguin, • 1985. • ---. David Copperfield. 1849-1850. New York: Houghton Mifflin • Company, 1958. • Miller, J. Hillis. Charles Dickens: The World and His Novels. • Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1958. • Zwerdling, Alex. “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” PMLA 88 (May • 1973): 429-439.

8. What information about a source do you include in a Works Cited Page Most citations contain the following basic information: • Author’s name • Title of work • Publication information (what company published it, where and when it was published)

9. Works Cited: Some Examples • Book: Byatt, A. S. Babel Tower. New York: Random House, 1996. • Article in a Magazine: Klein, Joe. “Dizzy Days.” The New Yorker 5 Oct. 1998: 40-45. • Web page: Poland, Dave. “The Hot Button.” Roughcut. 26 Oct. 1998. Turner Network Television. 28 Oct. 1998 <www.roughcut.com>. • Newspaper article: Tommasini, Anthony. “Master Teachers Whose Artistry Glows in Private.” New York Times 27 Oct. 1998: B2. • A source with no known author: “Cigarette Sales Fall 30% as California Tax Rises.” New York Times 14 Sept. 1999: A17. • Encyclopedia: Bergman, P. G. "Relativity." The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. 15th ed. 1987.

10. When Should You Use Cite a Source within your paper? • When quoting any words that are not your own • Quoting means to repeat another source word for word, using quotation marks • When summarizing facts & ideas from a source • Summarizing means to take ideas from a large passage of another source and condense them, using your own words • When paraphrasinga source • Paraphrasing means to use the ideas from another source but change the phrasing into your own words

11. How will I create a Works Cited Page? • You will use an internet site called NoodleBib that will help you create a works cited page. • All you will have to do is sign in to the site, select what type of source you are using (book, website, magazine, reference book) and type in the information it asks for!!

12. How do I let the person reading my paper know where I got my facts from? • You use CITATIONS! • A citation usually just tells the author’s name and the page number in the book where you got your information. • The citation (author, page #) is contained within (parentheses) • Every time you summarize ideas or facts, paraphrase a source, or quote a source, you must put a CITATION at the end of it.

13. What does a Citation within your paper look like? (author’s name, page number). Example: • You’ve just summarized some facts that you collected from page 5 of a book called Mummies by an author named Katie Ross. • The first mummies in Ancient Egypt were discovered by Ronnie Ortega in 2005 in the Nile River Valley (Ross, 5). • Notice that you’ve only given the author’s name and the number of the page where you got the facts in parentheses after the sentence in which you used facts from this source. • Notice that the period at the end of the sentence comes AFTER the CITATION.

14. What if I quote a source? • You must use “quotation marks” to let your reader know that you are quoting someone else’s words • Author’s last name & page number(s) of quote must appear after the quote: Mummies are “the most beautiful forms of art one has ever seen” (Ross, 263).

15. What if my source doesn’t have an author? • If the source has no known author, then use an abbreviated version of the title: Full Title: “California Cigarette Tax Deters Smokers” Citation: (“California” A14)

16. Make sure to give your sources credit!!! • Always include all of the sources you used to do your research in your Works Cited page. • Always give credit to your source when you quote, summarize, or paraphrase from a source by using a CITATION (author, page #).