Blog 7 - Ch.7 BBG

When I'm writing a research paper, plagiarism is one of the scariest things I tend to worry about. I knew reading chapter 7 would be the right move. I have always known not to plagiarize, but there are so many forms of plagiarism that could happen on accident that you can never be too sure when writing down something you learned. This makes it critical to know when and how to integrate sources, which is described in the first section of the chapter. Giving credit for something is an obvious requirement; however, how does someone know when credit is due or not? I used to worry because I didn’t know if it was plagiarism if I read something online, thought about what I learned, and wrote down some form of what I learned from what I read because I did use some words that I couldn't change. I worried so much, but I soon realized that education of citing sources correctly is not given enough. This chapter really helps when describing parenthetical citation and signal phrases. There are so many ways to cite something, such as quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, it is often hard to know what is plagiarized or not. It's important to be careful and thanks to this chapter, I feel more confident in avoiding plagiarism. I found it helpful when it reminded the readers to make sure to cite sources in drafts and make sure the composition of what you're writing is not too direct unless marked with quotes.