10.5 Writing With Integrity
Writing with integrity requires accurately representing what you contributed as well as acknowledging how others have influenced your work. Plagiarism occurs when someone uses another person’s “intellectual property” and doesn’t give them credit. Intellectual property is defined as material or ideas envisioned and created by another person. There are many kinds of intellectual property, including books, articles, essays, stories, poems, films, photographs, works of art or craft, or even just ideas. In the course of research, it’s entirely likely that you may find a perfect turn of phrase or a way of communicating ideas that fits your needs perfectly. Using it in your writing is fine, provided that you credit the source fully enough that your readers can find it on their own. If you fail to take careful notes or the sentence is present in your writing but later fails to get accurate attribution, it can have a negative impact on you and your organization. That is why it is important that when you find an element you would like to incorporate in your document, in the same moment as you copy and paste or make a note of it in your research file, you need to note the source in a complete enough form to find it again.
Giving credit where credit is due will build your credibility and enhance your document. Moreover, when your writing is authentically yours, your audience will catch your enthusiasm, and you will feel more confident in the material you produce. Just as you have a responsibility in business to be honest in selling your product or service and avoid cheating your customers, so you have a responsibility in business writing to be honest in presenting your idea, and the ideas of others, and to avoid cheating your readers with plagiarized material.
What Is Citing?
Citing is basically giving credit. If your source is well-cited, you’ve told the audience who the ideas or words belong to and you’ve told the audience exactly where to go to find those words.
Why Cite Sources?
1. To Avoid Plagiarism
Plagiarism can occur on purpose or be accidental. It can also result from performance pressure, lapses in judgement, total ignorance, or a plethora of other reasons. This is why it is important to be vigilant and aim to be above reproach in your quest to write and communicate ethically.
2. To Acknowledge the Work of Others
One major purpose of citations is to simply provide credit where it is due. When you provide accurate citations, you are acknowledging both the hard work that has gone into producing research and the person(s) who performed that research.
3. To Provide Credibility to Your Work & to Place Your Work in Context
Providing accurate citations puts your work and ideas into context. They tell your reader that you’ve done your research and know what others have said about your topic. Not only do citations provide context for your work but they also lend credibility and authority to your claims. Further, proper citation also demonstrates the ways in which research is social: no one researches in a vacuum—we all rely on the work of others to help us during the research process.
4. To Help Your Future Researching Self & Other Researchers Easily Locate Sources
Having accurate citations will help you as a researcher and writer keep track of the sources and information you find so that you can easily find the source again. Accurate citations may take some effort to produce, but they will save you time in the long run.
How to Cite Sources
Citation and source use are all about balance. If you don’t use enough sources, you might struggle to make a thorough argument. If you cite too much, you won’t leave room for your own voice in your piece. To cite sources, you should make two things clear:
- The difference between your words and the source’s words.
- The difference between your ideas and the source’s ideas.
You essentially have three ways of using source material available to you as explained in Activity 10.2.
Activity 10.2 | Using Source Material
Quoting Sources
Quoting is the easiest way to use sources in a research document, but it also requires care in using it properly so that you don’t accidentally plagiarize, misquote, or overquote. At its simplest, quoting takes source text exactly as it is and puts quotation marks (“ ”) around that text to set it off from your own words. The following points represent conventions and best practices when quoting:
- Use double quotation marks: In North America, we set off quoted words from our own words with double quotation marks (“ ”). Opening quotation marks look a little like a tiny superscript “66” and the closing marks like “99.”
- Use a signal phrase to integrate a quotation: Frame a quotation with a “signal phrase” that identifies the source author or speaker by name and/or role along with a verb relating how the quotation was delivered. The signal phrase can precede, follow, or even split the quotation, and you can choose from a variety of available signal phrase expressions suitable for your purposes (Hacker, 2006, p. 603):
- According to researchers Tblisky and Darion (2003), “. . .”
- As Vice President of Operations Rhonda Rendell has noted, “. . .”
- John Rucker, the first responder who pulled Mr. Warren from the wreckage, said that “. . .”
- Spokespersons Gloria and Tom Grady clarified the new regulations: “. . .”
- “. . . ,” confirmed the minister responsible for the initiative.
- “. . . ,” writes Eva Hess, “. . .”
- Quote purposefully: Quote only when the original wording is important. When we quote famous thinkers like Albert Einstein or Marshall McLuhan, we use their exact words because no one could say it better or more interestingly than they did. Also, quote when you want your audience to see wording exactly as it appeared in the source text or as it was said in speech so that they can be sure that you’re not distorting the words as you might if you paraphrased instead. But if there’s nothing special about the original wording, then it’s better to paraphrase.
- Don’t overquote: A good rule of thumb is that your completed document should contain no more than 10% quoted material. Otherwise, it will appear that you have few original ideas and rely on quotations to write your document for you.
Paraphrasing Sources
Paraphrasing or “indirect quotation” is putting source text in your own words and altering the sentence structure to avoid using the quotation marks required in direct quotation. Paraphrasing is the preferred way of using a source when the original wording isn’t important. This way, you can incorporate the source’s ideas so they’re stylistically consistent with the rest of your document and thus better tailored to the needs of your audience. Also, paraphrasing a source into your own words proves your advanced understanding of the source text. A paraphrase must faithfully represent the source text by containing the same ideas as in the original in about the same length. As a matter of good writing, however, you should try to streamline your paraphrase so that it tallies fewer words than the source passage while still preserving the original meaning.
A common mistake made when paraphrasing is to go only partway towards paraphrasing by substituting-out major words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) here and there while leaving the source passage’s basic sentence structure intact. This inevitably leaves strings of words from the original untouched in the “paraphrased” version, which can be dangerous because including such direct quotation without quotation marks is considered plagiarism. Activity 10.3 below compares an unsuccessful and successful paraphrase.
Activity 10.3 | Unsuccessful vs Successful Paraphrase
| Original | Unsuccessful Paraphrase | Successful Paraphrase |
| “Students frequently overuse direct quotation [when] taking notes, and as a result they overuse quotations in the final [research] paper. Probably only about 10% of your final manuscript should appear as directly quoted matter. Therefore, you should strive to limit the amount of exact transcribing of source materials while taking notes.” (Lester, 1976, p. 46-47) | Students often overuse quotations when taking notes, and thus overuse them in research reports. About 10% of your final paper should be direct quotation. You should thus attempt to reduce the exact copying of source materials while note-taking (Lester, 1976). | Lester (1976) advises against exceeding 10% quotation in your written work. Students writing research reports often quote excessively because of copy-cut-and-paste note-taking. Students should try to minimize using sources word for word (pp. 46-47). |
In the unsuccessful paraphrase, several strings of words from the original are left untouched because the writer didn’t go the distance in changing the sentence structure of the original. The fix would be to paraphrase more thoroughly by altering the words and the sentence structure, as shown in the successful paraphrase.
How to Paraphrase in 5 Steps
- Read and re-read the source-text passage so that you thoroughly understand each point it makes. If it’s a long passage, you might want to break it up into digestible chunks. If you’re unsure of the meaning of any of the words, look them up in a dictionary.
- Without looking back at the source text, jot down your understanding of the source-text and tailor the language so that it’s stylistically appropriate for your audience; edit and proofread your version to make it grammatically correct.
- Now compare your written paraphrase version to the original to ensure that:
- You’ve accurately represented the meaning of the original without:
- Deleting any of the original points
- Adding any points of your own
- Distorting any of the ideas so they mean something substantially different from those in the original
- You haven’t repeated any two identical words from the original in a row
- You’ve accurately represented the meaning of the original without:
- If any two words from the original remain, go further in changing those expressions by using a thesaurus in combination with a dictionary. When you enter a word into a thesaurus, it gives you a list of synonyms, which are different words that mean the same thing as the word you enter into it.
- Be careful, however; many of those words will mean the same thing as the word you enter into the thesaurus in certain contexts but not in others, especially if you enter a homonym, which is a word that has different meanings in different parts of speech.
- For instance, the noun party can mean a group that is involved in something serious (e.g., a third-party software company in a data-collection process), but the verb party means something you might do on a night out with friends; it can also function as an adjective related to the verb (e.g., party trick, meaning a trick performed at a party).
- Be careful, however; many of those words will mean the same thing as the word you enter into the thesaurus in certain contexts but not in others, especially if you enter a homonym, which is a word that has different meanings in different parts of speech.
- Cite your source. Just because you didn’t put quotation marks around the words doesn’t mean that you don’t have to cite your source.
Summarizing Sources
Summarizing is one of the most important skills in communications because professionals of every kind must explain to non-expert customers, managers, and even co-workers the complex concepts on which they are experts, but in a way that those non-experts can understand. Adapting the message to such audiences requires brevity but also translating jargon-heavy technical details into plain, accessible language.
Summarizing is thus paraphrasing only the highlights of a source text or speech. Like paraphrasing, a summary is an indirect quotation that re-casts the source in your own words; unlike a paraphrase, however, a summary is a fraction of the source length—anywhere from less than 1% to a quarter depending on the source length and length of the summary. A summary can reduce a whole novel or film to a single-sentence blurb, for instance, or it could reduce a 50-word paragraph to a 15-word sentence. It can be as casual as a spoken run-down of a meeting your colleague was absent from and wanted to know what he missed, or an elevator pitch selling a project idea to a manager. It can also be as formal as a memo report on a conference you attended on behalf of your organization, so your colleagues can learn in a few minutes of reading the highlights what you learned in a few days of attending the conference, saving them time and money. The procedure for summarizing is much like that of paraphrasing except that it involves the extra step of pulling out highlights from the source.
How to Summarize
- Determine how long your summary should be (according to your audience’s needs) so that you have a sense of how much material you should collect from the source.
- Read and re-read the source text so that you thoroughly understand it.
- Pull out the main points, which usually come first at any level of direct-strategy organization (i.e., the prologue or introduction at the beginning of a book, the abstract at the beginning of an article, or the topic sentence at the beginning of a paragraph).
- Disregard detail such as supporting evidence and examples.
- If you have an electronic copy of the source, copy and paste the main points into your notes; for a print source that you can mark up, use a highlighter then transcribe those main points into your electronic notes.
- How many points you collect depends on how big your summary should be.
- Paraphrase those main points following steps 1-4 for paraphrasing outlined above.
- Edit your draft to make it coherent, clear, and especially concise.
- Ensure that your summary meets the needs of your audience and that your source is cited. Again, not having quotation marks around words doesn’t mean that documenting your source(s) is not necessary.
Using quotations, summaries and paraphrases effectively takes time and practice. Purdue Online Writing Lab provides more information on how to effectively incorporate sources into your writing.
Want to learn more?
The University of Louisville Writing Center provides further explanation of incorporating sources with quotations, summaries and paraphrases in the video below.