Writing Center Video Tutorials

Hello everyone and welcome to our first video tutorial on avoiding plagiarism, brought to you by the Avila University Writing Center. I am Ashley Squires, the Director, and I’ll be guiding you through this topic over a few different installments.

So the Avila University Honor Code defines plagiarism as the act of taking ideas from somebody else and representing them as one’s own work without acknowledging the source. So this could include something like stealing part of an essay that’s written by another student and turning it in as if you wrote it, or copying sources you found on the internet or really anywhere else without properly citing them. It could also mean simply presenting somebody else’s ideas in a paper without telling your reader where they came from.

So at Avila, as at most universities around the world, plagiarism is considered to be a serious violation of academic ethics, and if caught a student can receive penalties that range from failing the assignment to actually being expelled from the university in the case of multiple egregious offenses. Such consequences can even occur if the student didn’t originally intend to plagiarize.

So for that reason it’s important to understand what plagiarism looks like and why it happens. So in this video we’re going to cover two different forms of plagiarism, why they are wrong, and how to avoid them in your writing. In a future video we’re going to cover the reasons why many students plagiarize and how those reasons can be addressed.

Western writing culture has really strong rules and norms around intellectual property that are designed to ensure that an individual’s work is recognized and that that individual can continue to benefit from the value of their ideas and words as they move through the world. And the benefit doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary — it can be simply through the development of reputation.

And this means that each time we want to refer to somebody else’s work in our own writing we need to give them credit. And in the academic world this practice of citation has three main effects.

First it gives the original author credit for their work. It helps that author build a reputation by showing them to be the originator of an idea. It also helps your readers by showing them where an idea originated and how it is being built upon — so in other words it assists future researchers with their own work by helping them understand where your ideas came from. But it also makes you the citing author look more credible, because your readers are going to see that you are aware of the work that has already been done in your field, that you’re building on existing ideas, and that you’re addressing major problems and questions that are of interest to people in your field.

What this means is that anytime you quote somebody else’s exact words in your own text you need to do three things. First of all you need to set it off with quotation marks that clearly distinguish your words from somebody else’s. You need to include a short in-text citation that shows the source the quote comes from, which looks a little bit like this. And third you need to provide a full list of references at the end of the paper. We’re going to cover the mechanics of how to do in-text citations and reference pages in a future video, so for now simply know that you will need to know how to do it in the future and that pretty much all papers that require you to use outside sources will require both in-text citation and references pages.

Anytime you use somebody else’s exact words in your writing without distinguishing them from your own it is considered an egregious form of plagiarism, and this is the form that is most often caught and punished.

However, most people know that they shouldn’t copy somebody else’s exact words without credit. But some students don’t always know that it is also wrong to copy somebody else’s idea without credit, even if you put those ideas in your own words. It’s really easy for students to get confused about this because we’re often taught in school how to paraphrase or summarize a text in our writing classes, but sometimes we just forget that you’re supposed to indicate the source of the idea even if there’s no need to actually use quotation marks.

The reason why we need to do this is because most pieces of writing are at least supposed to contain original ideas and not just original words. So an author should get credit for their original arguments and concepts even if the person citing them does not use their exact words. So this is best demonstrated through an example.

Let’s say for example that I’m writing an essay for a sociology class on working conditions in service industries. While I’m doing some initial research I read Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, which is the book that introduced the term “emotional labor,” which you might have heard before, into popular discourse. While reading this book I find this concept really compelling and I want to incorporate it in some way into my paper.

So one way that I could do this of course would be to simply quote Hochschild’s exact definition, embed it in quotation marks as I’ve done here, and I complete my task with an in-text citation and then with a references entry at the very end of the paper.

But let’s say I am interested in this whole passage including the flight attendant example that she uses, but it’s really too long to quote in full. I’m supposed to write like a thousand or 1500 word essay and I can’t fit this all in. So in that case a better strategy would be to try to paraphrase what the author says, using my own words to define emotional labor. So something like this:

In the modern service economy workers are called not only to labor physically on behalf of their employer but to manifest certain outward emotions that serve the image their employer is trying to project to the customer, like flight attendants who must remain cheerful and smiling despite the grueling, sometimes even dangerous conditions of their work.

Okay so you’ll notice if you go back and compare this paraphrase to the original text that no phrases in the sentence match Hochschild’s text exactly. So what am I doing wrong if I don’t cite it? Well, as the originator of the concept, Hochschild is supposed to be credited for her idea and I am supposed to signal that I, the author of my class paper, have been informed by her work. What’s more, the flight attendant is one of Hochschild’s key examples of the concept — a pretty famous one in fact — and it would be really dishonest to pretend like I came up with that example all by myself.

So the more correct way of course would be to do it like this, with the proper in-text citation, which again we’ll show you how to do in a later video, even though the statement doesn’t require any quotation marks anywhere.

However some of you might be saying, I have definitely seen the term “emotional labor” before and I have never heard of this book. And that’s likely true. In the decades since The Managed Heart was written, the term emotional labor has been popularized, and so you will see it used by journalists, television hosts, bloggers, comedians, etc. to describe everything from the requirement that you maintain a cheerful attitude in your fast food job to the extra work that is expected of many women in the home such as tending to the emotions of family members. Most people who use this term never credit Hochschild, and Hochschild herself has pointed out that the term has been subject to concept creep, meaning that people now regularly use it in a way that is pretty far from her original intent.

So if you’re going to stick to Hochschild’s original definition and refer to her original examples such as the flight attendant, then you need to show where it comes from. Furthermore, when you are writing in an academic context we really expect you to write with an awareness of where your ideas and concepts come from. So even if you want to use a more popular or recent definition of the term, or even if you originally heard about it from somewhere else, you will be a more credible writer if you show that you know where it originally came from. After all it’s in the Wikipedia entry, and you definitely shouldn’t try to pass off the concept of emotional labor as if you were the one who came up with it, because there is an excellent chance that your reader will know.

So you might then say, but wait — does this mean that I have to cite a source every time I mention something that I learned from somewhere else, like for example my textbook? And the answer is not really.

You never need to cite a source when you are talking about something that you have discovered through your own personal experience, observation of the world, or original research. You also do not need to cite a source when referring to common public facts. So for example, while a particular argument about the root causes of the First World War — such as the one famously made by Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August — definitely needs to be cited, the fact that it occurred between 1914 and 1918 is not something you need to cite, even if you originally found out about it from a source like Wikipedia. The reason is that the dates for the First World War are agreed upon settled fact that you can find in literally thousands if not millions of sources. It’s not the property of the first person to ever put that span of years in print.

Meanwhile there are many theories, arguments, and interpretations regarding the root causes of the war, and to discuss them you generally should refer to their authors.

That said, it is sometimes the case that an idea that once needed to be argued for becomes an established fact. For example, the double helical structure of the molecule deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was first described in a 1953 article by Watson and Crick. However in the intervening years the structure of DNA has been confirmed and redescribed many times over. It is in school textbooks, taught to small children at this point. The structure of DNA is a well established fact and you don’t really need to cite the 1953 article or your grade school textbook if you’re simply going to say that DNA has a double helical structure.

So if any of this makes you nervous, you’re in good company. Once students find out that it is possible to plagiarize without even knowing it, it’s easy to get a little bit paranoid about it. However if you ever have any questions about what you’re doing, please feel free to come to the Writing Center to talk with one of our consultants about it. Be sure to bring along a copy of your assignment and the sources you are concerned about, and we’ll be happy to discuss strategies for using them while maintaining your academic ethics. Thank you for watching this video and I hope we will see you in the Writing Center.

Hello all, this is Ashley Squires, the Director of the Writing Center at Avila University, and I want to thank you first of all for watching this second video in our series on what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. In our previous installment we looked at a couple of different types of plagiarism, and in a separate set of videos we’ll talk about how to properly format citations in APA and MLA format so that it’s always clear to your reader what words and ideas are your own and what words and ideas come from somewhere else. So look for other videos in this playlist and on our website if you want to learn more about those topics.

In this video and in the next two videos I’m going to continue the discussion about plagiarism and talk about why plagiarism happens and what specific steps you as a student can take to avoid being tempted to make sloppy or unethical decisions.

So I think one common mistake it’s easy to make when talking about plagiarism is to assume that people do unethical things like copy somebody else’s work because they are unethical people. But this is something that’s known in psychology as the fundamental attribution error, which is defined by Patrick Healy at Harvard Business School as an individual’s tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character or personality while attributing their own behavior to external situational factors outside of their control. In other words, he says, you tend to cut yourself a break while holding others 100% accountable for their actions. So in a plagiarism case it could look something like — well that person cheated because they’re a cheater, whereas in my case I cut corners a little bit because I basically had no other choice, it was either that or fail the class, or something like this.

The reality of life is always a little bit more complicated. The way we act is usually some result of both our personalities and the set of circumstances we find ourselves in. But the reason why the fundamental attribution error is so tempting and so dangerous is that it can lead us to assume that we ourselves would never behave badly because we’re not bad people. But the truth is that all of us may be tempted to be a little bit dishonest if we find ourselves in particular situations.

So it’s the responsibility of everyone involved in education — both instructors and students — to play a role in managing the conditions that can result in someone being tempted to plagiarize. These videos are intended to focus on the student side. And in focusing on the student side we’re going to talk about three common reasons for plagiarism and how to deal with them if you find yourself confronting these situations, if you find yourself being tempted.

So reason number one — procrastination.

I’m sure that procrastination is a problem that most of you can identify with, it is certainly one that I identify with. Your professor gives you say a week to do a writing assignment and for whatever reason you can always think of something better to do than actually sitting down and writing it. So you find yourself staring at the computer in the wee hours the night before the paper is due and the ideas start coming. And at a time like this it could feel like just copying some stuff that you found on the internet is a plausible way to get out of your predicament, and given that it’s like three in the morning you may even find a way to convince yourself that you won’t actually be caught and that this will all just be fine in the end.

So if you find yourself in this situation I’m going to give you two recommendations. One is a recommendation that you can apply in the immediate term while you’re sitting at that computer in the middle of the night, and the other one is one that you can apply over the longer term as you try to avoid this kind of situation in the future.

So my suggestion for you if you are sitting at your computer in the middle of the night is one that your professors might not love that I’m giving you, but if the alternative is copying and pasting from Wikipedia then trust me this is infinitely better both for you and for your professor.

Give yourself permission to write a bad paper.

I’m really serious about this. A lot of the worst procrastinators I know are not bad students and not bad writers and not bad people. Many of them are perfectionists who will just avoid any task when they don’t believe they can do it exactly right on the first try, and so they let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

But let’s do some basic math here. The penalty for not turning in a paper at all is a zero. And typically if you plagiarize and get caught this is also the grade that you will get — sometimes it may even mean that you fail the class or get kicked out of school. But if you turn a paper in and it meets the minimum requirements but isn’t the very best argument that you can make, and there are some grammar mistakes, and all in all it’s not the very best work that you can do — I mean what’s the worst grade we’re talking about here? You know, a 50, a 60 out of 100 — those numbers are all higher than zero. So anytime I have a student who is facing a choice between not turning something in and getting a lower grade than they want, remember that the choice here is actually pretty obvious — turn in a bad paper. I can work with a bad paper, your professor can work with a bad paper, they can give you feedback, they can tell you how to improve it. But there’s not much to work with if we’re working with no paper at all, and a plagiarized paper is even worse.

So if you find yourself sitting at your desk at three in the morning with a paper that’s due at nine, take a look at the assignment first of all. Make some notes about the minimum requirements — you know, the length that it needs to be, the number of sources you have to use, the topic it has to cover — and write something that just meets those requirements and then let it go. And you can simply do better on the next try. Okay, but this is what you should do if you find yourself sitting at your desk at three in the morning.

Now once you have gotten past this crisis and you’ve had a chance to catch up on sleep, here is a strategy that I recommend you use to address the longer term procrastination problem.

Next time you get a writing assignment, take a look at the deadline and then immediately go to Navigate and make a Writing Center appointment. I recommend that you choose a date that is roughly in the middle between the day that the assignment is given and the day that the assignment is due.

A common misconception that a lot of students have about the Writing Center is that your paper has to be finished before you can come visit us, and this is just absolutely incorrect. You do not even have to have anything written to come into the Writing Center. Okay, so if you are making an appointment in between, that basically guarantees that at some point — before you’re awake at three o’clock in the morning sitting in front of your computer panicking about the work you have to do — there will be some point where you will at least have to think about that paper before you reach that point.

If you come to the Writing Center we can just help you brainstorm a draft, we can also help you revise an incomplete draft. Having a Writing Center appointment gives you an intermediate deadline to work towards and it’s a low stakes deadline because you’re not going to be graded. Knowing you’re not going to fail, there’s really no chance of anything bad happening — only good things can happen if you make this Writing Center appointment. It might motivate you to get a rough draft completed before you come in and we can spend that session coming up with a revision plan. But at the minimum it pretty much guarantees you won’t wind up sweating at three o’clock in the morning. And the worst case scenario is that you don’t have anything written — then we kind of do a brainstorming session and you can leave with a plan and an outline and a thesis statement. You’ll leave with something that will enable you to get started. And if you do find yourself in a situation where you’re trying to get it done in the hours before the assignment is due, then at least you have a foundation to build on, and that foundation will be genuinely yours. It will be something that you yourself came up with, not something that somebody else wrote, and so you won’t be quite as tempted to take somebody else’s work when you have already begun to do your own.

So if you struggle with procrastination the temptation to plagiarize is probably going to come up for you at some point. Procrastination itself can be a difficult problem to address, but at the Writing Center and the Academic Success and Tutoring Services Center we can help you come up with strategies for managing it. Hopefully this video gives you at least a couple of ways to avoid some of the very worst consequences of getting caught writing a paper at the last minute, and some practical ways to deal with this particular problem. Thank you.

Hello everybody and thank you for joining us on this third video on how to avoid plagiarism. I am Ashley Squires, the Director of the Writing Center at Avila University, and in previous videos I’ve talked about major types of plagiarism and one of the big reasons why students plagiarize, which is procrastination.

So procrastination is related to this second reason why a lot of students wind up plagiarizing — that’s because for many people fear of writing is what leads to procrastination in the first place. There are a lot of people for whom writing assignments are just really scary things, and that includes many people who are actually quite gifted writers.

So maybe you’ve had the experience of getting bad feedback on your writing and that kind of freaked you out, maybe it’s really difficult for you to concentrate in front of a computer, maybe when you’re sitting there with your laptop open and that cursor is blinking away at you you’re just absolutely miserable. And it can start to feel like there is something wrong with you and that if you were good at writing this just wouldn’t feel so hard. But the reality is that if you have ever sat in front of a computer and really struggled to make words appear on the screen, you’re having basically the average experience of writing.

Writing is really hard and that is true even of gifted, genius writers. And in fact we have great examples of this even in popular culture.

So you might remember the musical Tick, Tick… Boom! which was made into a film last year, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda and released on Netflix, and it tells the story of its author Jonathan Larson, who was a composer and playwright who would eventually go on to write Rent, which is one of the most famous musicals of all time.

The Jonathan Larson who is again the real person but is also the character is in a situation in which he’s about to present his musical that he’s been working on for the last 10 years — basically his entire 20s — to a bunch of Broadway producers in order to try to get it turned into a real show. And before the performance he just needs to write one more song that will help tie the whole story together. And for most of the musical he just can’t get the song written. He has no ideas and all of the circumstances of life keep getting in the way. He has a friend who’s sick in the hospital, he and his girlfriend are fighting, he has to work his job at a diner to pay rent, his electricity gets cut off. And it’s not until the early morning before the workshop that he is finally able to write this song.

So the point is here that there are plenty of times when writing is just really really hard and that doesn’t mean you’re bad at it. There are people who are award-winning writers who feel this way sometimes. In fact the really celebrated writer Anne Lamott has an entire book in which she talks about this a lot.

So if writing is scary for you then I have a few different suggestions and the first two of these are actually taken from Lamott herself.

So the first is the same advice that I give to procrastinators, which is give yourself permission to write bad stuff. Nobody has to see it — write the bad stuff so that you can revise it and turn it into good stuff. Okay, and Lamott calls this the principle of shitty first drafts. Just sit down and write whatever you need to do to get it down on the page and then you can go back and start revising and shaping it.

The second piece of advice is one that’s probably somewhat familiar to you, which is to break down larger writing tasks into smaller ones. So if you know you have a five page paper to write, that can feel really impossible if you try to sit down and tackle it all in one sitting or even in one day. So if you can try to work ahead — maybe motivate yourself by making a Writing Center appointment in advance like I talked about doing in the previous video — and then sit down and write for like 15 minutes at a time. And you can say I’m just going to write this one paragraph today, or in the next 10 minutes I’m going to summarize this one source. Okay, make it something that feels manageable, something that can be accomplished in 15 to 30 minutes. Much more doable than sitting down to just write the entire five pages all in one go.

So the final piece of advice is one that is a little bit more for the longer term, and this is to take time to learn about your own writing process. And you may have a kind of a stereotyped or rote understanding of what the writing process looks like, and I want to kind of free you up to explore and experiment and figure out what works best for you here.

So at some point in school you may have been taught pre-writing techniques like writing an outline. And that works for some people — writing an outline of the whole essay before you sit down to actually start drafting it. It doesn’t work for everybody. It doesn’t work for me, for example. I don’t think I’ve written an outline since I left high school, and that was a very long time ago I must tell you.

So it doesn’t work for everybody. Some people need to just sit down and write everything they think about a topic in as messy and disorganized a fashion as you can imagine before they can start giving it shape, and this is a technique that I call brain dumping because you’re literally just dumping out your brain on the topic onto the paper or into the computer document.

Some people on the other hand need to read for a while before they can kind of figure out what they themselves think about a topic, so they need to think of writing more as responding to something else rather than just sitting down and trying to come up with their own ideas.

Figuring out what works for you takes a lot of experimentation. And in addition to brainstorming and pre-writing methods, you need to figure out if you write better in the morning or late at night, or if you are an inside person versus an outside person.

So as an illustration of this, there was an interview recently between New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, who has written over 30 books in the last couple of decades — a very prolific and successful writer. I’ve read some of these books and they are very very large. And Robinson talked about how in the last few years he just hit a wall. Some of this was related to the pandemic, some of it was just the fact that he’s been writing so long — he was having trouble writing and in fact he was starting to worry that his career might be over, that he just wasn’t going to be able to write anymore. And then he tried moving his workspace outside and it worked so well for him that he put a tarp up over his chair so that he could work there during the rain.

And some people just really can’t even think on a computer — notice there’s no computer terminal here. Some people need a pad of paper and a pen. Some people can’t think with implements in their hands at all. Sometimes people need to kind of get out in nature where they think best. Go take a walk, lie in the grass, take up knitting, go for a run, play a sport, do whatever you need to do — you know, something where your brain can kind of come along in the background as you’re going. And it’s a good idea to maybe keep a pen and some notes paper or your phone with a notes app close at hand so that you can write down ideas if they come to you.

But writing and inventing doesn’t necessarily mean just sitting and staring at a Word document all day. Some people just cannot be productive that way.

Also consider alternative techniques to sitting down and writing. Some people do better if they record their thoughts and then go back and transcribe them later. And in fact that’s a technique we’ll use in the Writing Center — have students talk about their ideas and then go back and write them down.

So while you’re a student this is actually a really great time to do some experimentation and figure out what works for you. Even if you aren’t planning on becoming a professional writer — and that’s fine — everybody has to do some writing sometimes, and that is true no matter which career you pick. And so having some confidence in your ability to get it done will help you avoid the temptation to take shortcuts or to do things that are a little bit unethical or that are otherwise counterproductive, even if there’s not like an ethics or honesty problem.

Just remember that the best writing process is the one that works for you. There is no single right way to approach this. Some people might try to sell you on the idea that their process is the best one, but the truth is that the best writing process is whatever helps you get words on the page.

So if writing is an intimidating task for you, I hope this video helps you understand that while writing is difficult for most people, developing a better understanding of your own process can make it easier. And furthermore there is just no reason to feel shame if you are having difficulty writing, because that experience is nearly universal even among really talented writers who do this professionally. And finally, one of the benefits of understanding your own process and adopting strategies that work for you is that it will make it less likely for you to be tempted to avoid the task entirely by taking somebody else’s work.

So if you come to the Writing Center we will be happy to help you along on this journey of self-discovery. Thank you very much for watching.

Hello everyone and welcome to this final installment, at least for now, in our series on avoiding plagiarism.

So so far we’ve covered different types of plagiarism and also some major reasons why students are tempted to plagiarize. Today we’re going to cover the third and last big reason in this series of why students may plagiarize. But while the previous two videos dealt with cases in which students may be tempted to intentionally misrepresent somebody else’s work as their own, with the reason we’re going to talk about now the intentionality tends to be a little bit more ambiguous. And that is because it also tends to show up around a kind of gray form of plagiarism than what we’ve really been talking about so far. So this is something that’s often called patch plagiarism or patch writing.

So patch plagiarism looks sort of like this. What happens is that a student who has been taught to summarize and paraphrase sources in their paper tries to do that, but in a way that is still so close to the original text that it’s really hard to say whether the student has put the ideas into their own words at all.

So take a look at this sample here. We have the original passage and then we have a patch written paragraph. Okay so take just a moment to look at these two and see if you can identify the similarities and differences between the two of them.

Okay so what you might have noticed is that while the sentence structure of the patch written paragraph is somewhat different than the original passage, some really key terms have been borrowed. So we have the term “everyday experts,” we have “automaticity” that separates experts from novices, the ability to come to the right conclusion — okay, it’s really just “eventually” that’s been taken out here. Okay so what we have is really key words and phrases have been mostly preserved with maybe a word or two here removed and the clause structure moved around a little bit. So it’s for all intents and purposes almost, or at least very very similar to, the original passage and it’s really hard to say that this is actually the student’s own words.

Whereas we see in the effective summary example here that this has actually summarized it in a way that makes it a little bit shorter, and the writer has used the strategy of taking this really kind of distinctive word “automaticity” — that’s not a word you hear all that often — and placing that in quotation marks so that it’s clear that it’s a term that was used. And you know in some cases you may put in quotation marks a term that is actually kind of invented by the author, but it’s used here in order to show that this is a word that the student got from their original source.

Okay so how does patch writing happen? Well, as with any form of plagiarism there are a lot of different reasons. Sometimes the student is in a panic and just didn’t take the time to summarize or paraphrase effectively, for example. But the reason I really want to focus on in this video is one that arises among students who are often really good at studying — so not intending to be dishonest, not intending to be sloppy or anything like that, but students who are really good students.

So the reason that I’m going to talk about here is over dependence on sources. And over dependence can kind of run on a continuum, and by sources I can mean many different kinds of sources — the source could be a textbook, a teacher, a piece of research, etc.

So sometimes this is a confidence issue, but it’s a confidence issue that occurs among students who tend to get good grades already. So students who know how to study. These are students who are excellent at reading and memorizing the information that they find in a textbook or in their notes from class, and when it comes time to write something of their own usually one of the following things happens.

So they might have some difficulty differentiating their own ideas from the source. They might have some trouble — they think of something and are like okay wait, did I get that from somewhere else or did I come up with that on my own? And there are strategies for dealing with this that I’ll talk about in a second. But it may simply be a kind of identity crisis where you don’t know if your ideas are genuinely yours or if you got them from somewhere else.

In other cases it could be that the student is simply convinced that they have no new ideas to add, that having read so much about a topic you just kind of come to think that well there’s nothing else to be said, there is nothing original I can possibly add to this conversation. So all of the ideas are taken, so all I could really do is paraphrase and summarize and potentially steal what other people have already said.

One other thing that might happen is that the student just becomes convinced that even if they do want to take some ownership over their ideas, even if they do have some original thoughts to add, that basically they can’t come up with any additional words to use to talk about these ideas, that whatever they have to say about the topic it can’t possibly be better than the words of this professional writer who is their source.

So if you think that this describes you, then I do want to encourage you to recognize that writing in college is about developing your own ideas. It’s not just about repeating what other people have said, whether those people are your teacher or the experts or anybody else. We are interested in seeing you grow in your ability to create and defend your own arguments, not just tell us what we want to hear.

So there are some practical things that you can do while you are preparing to write.

First of all, when you take notes on a source go ahead and transcribe some useful quotes — things that you think are particularly distinctive or where you really like the wording. Your entire essay can’t be quotes, but you know you can have some, a few well chosen quotes inserted in there that help define a term really well, or that illustrate a novel concept, or maybe it’s a really vivid example that you would like to refer to. So pick and choose — be selective about the things that you want to quote directly.

Then when you are done reading, close the book or the PDF file that you’re working from and write down your own summary. And importantly, try to do it without looking. Okay so write down the author’s main argument and maybe summarize some key examples, again without looking at their words. And this can help you kind of develop a summary that’s more independent from exactly what the writer says than if you were just looking directly at the paragraph where the argument is laid out.

Secondly, after you’ve read and after you’ve taken notes and after you’ve closed the book or the file, write a brief response. Okay — what did you think? Were you persuaded by the author’s argument? What arguments and evidence worked for you and what didn’t? Writing in an academic setting is almost always in conversation with what other people are saying on a topic. It’s not really about developing some crazy wild idea that oh my gosh nobody has ever thought of this before. It’s more about being able to synthesize and pull together ideas, to respond to what other people are saying, to come up with new ways of looking at or talking about a topic than what is already being said. Okay, it is perfectly fine if your writing responds to somebody else, it just shouldn’t copy someone else, at least not in the way that we saw with the sample we looked at earlier.

So after you have read your source, taken notes, written a summary — sit down and write a brief response about what you thought, because this can often be a way of sparking those original ideas. Think about sources as things that you can talk back to, not just something that you are mining for facts and quotes.

Okay so we at the Avila University Writing Center have actually created a note-taking worksheet that is designed to help you through this process and can also by the way help you kind of keep your research organized as you go. So depending on how you were accessing this video you can either download it by clicking the link in the description or just by navigating directly to the Writing Center website.

So hopefully at this point, having seen this video series, you should see that avoiding unethical behavior in your academic writing is not just about knowing how to use quotation marks or to format a citation in APA — we of course have videos covering those skills and we’re happy to help you with them. Combating this kind of temptation often involves understanding yourself better and becoming more mature and thoughtful in your overall approach to writing.

So I hope this video series gives you something to think about as well as some practical solutions for confronting the kind of study problems that can lead you down this very dark path. And just remember that we in the Writing Center are always here to help you on this journey. So thank you very much for watching.

Hello all and welcome to this tutorial video. I am Ashley Squires, the Director of the Writing Center here at Avila University, and today I’m going to show you how to cite a source in your text using MLA format.

So let’s quickly review the reasons why it’s important to cite your sources.

First of all, citing sources gives people credit for their original ideas and work. When you cite a source you’re acknowledging that the ideas and information came from somewhere else and are the intellectual property of their original author.

Secondly, citing sources helps your reader understand where your information is coming from. If a reader is interested in following up on an example you provide or knowing more about where a statistic comes from, then showing your source allows them to verify it independently. So it’s a courtesy to your reader.

And finally, citing sources helps enhance your credibility as a writer. It shows that you’ve done your research and that you’re responding to what other people have written about your topic.

But what counts as a citation? So typically when we cite a source in an academic paper we need to do three things. First of all we need to use quotation marks whenever we’re quoting from another source directly — that helps us distinguish between our words and words we got from somewhere else. Secondly we need to provide an in-text or sometimes called a parenthetical citation anytime we quote, paraphrase, or discuss a source in our writing — typically looks like this in MLA. And we need to provide a complete list of works cited at the end of the paper.

So this video is going to cover item number two and we’ll cover the basics of works cited lists in a separate video.

So one thing you should know before we dive into the subject here is that there are actually dozens, even hundreds, of different citation systems out there. All of these citation standards are provided by different publishers and academic organizations. So the Chicago University Press publishes the Chicago Manual of Style, the Modern Languages Association publishes the MLA Handbook, the American Psychological Association is responsible for the APA Handbook. So which citation system professionals use generally depends on where they’re publishing. But certain formats tend to dominate within certain disciplines — so Chicago and MLA are commonly used in the humanities, which is why you’ll see MLA come up a lot in say English classes. APA on the other hand has become sort of the format of choice in the social sciences, so if you’re a psychology major or a sociology major or an economics major you may have to use APA much more frequently than MLA.

MLA is actually generally the easiest citation format to master, which is why it’s often taught in high schools. But if you’re new to using academic citation methods then this may be a good one for you to start with. It requires a little bit less information than APA and the formatting requirements are a little bit more consistent and easier to remember.

So as I said, an in-text or a parenthetical citation needs to be provided anytime you quote, paraphrase, or discuss a source in your text.

In MLA all you need in order to do this is the last name of the author and the page number that the quote or the piece of information comes from, though there are sometimes some exceptions to this and I’ll talk about those in a moment.

So if you take a look at this very standard MLA citation you’ll notice that the parenthetical citation always comes at the end of the sentence where the quotation or the paraphrase occurs. And again we have author’s last name and we have a page number. You should notice that there is no punctuation separating the name and the page number — just a single space, no need for a comma or anything like that. Also you should notice that the parenthetical citation is considered part of the sentence so it goes inside the final period. Okay, if you stick it outside it looks like it’s actually part of the next sentence — we want to keep it part of the same sentence that contains the quote, so inside the period.

So this is the basic in-text citation form that you’ll use in MLA, and honestly if you do this every single time you cite sources in your paper you will mostly have gotten it right. But there are a couple of variations that you should just be aware of and that you may need to put into practice to make sure that you’re doing everything okay for your paper.

So first of all, if you happen to mention the name of the author in your text using something called an attributive tag — which is just a fancy word for kind of an introduction to a quote, in this case the attributive tag is “J. Allison describes” — we have a whole handout on attributive tags available on the Writing Center website and I will also provide a link to that in the description on YouTube.

So if you mention the name of the author in your text it’s just obvious who you’re talking about, and so you don’t need to repeat the author’s name in the parentheses again. If you do it, it’s doubtful that your teacher will mark it wrong, but you can just omit it — it would be redundant information, it’s not needed. So just a page number in parentheses is all that you need there.

Second variation — if it so happens that you are citing multiple works by the same author in your essay, this comes up sometimes say in a literature class where you have three different George Eliot novels perhaps that you are writing about for your final paper, and so your reader could easily get confused about which text you’re referring to if it’s just always Eliot page number, Eliot page number, etc. So what you do in this case is you provide a short form of the title — typically just like a word or a short phrase, just enough so that the reader will recognize it when they go to look it up in your works cited page. Generally the standard is like the first major word — so not “a,” “and,” or “the” — the first major word of the title is generally enough, sometimes you might need to include two or three words.

Finally, if you are citing a work that doesn’t have page numbers — and this tends to be the case a lot with online sources, if you’re citing from a web page or a news article that’s on a web page you generally don’t have page numbers — so my recommendation is to try finding another separator that would assist your reader in tracking down the reference if they wanted to. So something like a paragraph number or a section number. Since online articles tend to be pretty short, it generally isn’t a problem to count paragraphs — if there’s just 10 paragraphs then showing that it’s in paragraph 4 can be a help to your reader. Your instructor could potentially though have different expectations around this sort of thing, so if you’re unsure I would just ask. But in general this is what you should do — just find a different separator, a section number, a paragraph number, something like that in order to help your reader track down where a quote or a reference comes from.

Okay so that’s really it. Hopefully this guide should help you be able to format almost any in-text citation in MLA.

We’ve actually created a quick reference sheet for you which you can access again in the description if you’re watching on YouTube, or by going directly to our website at avila.edu/writingcenter. And this quick reference sheet contains all of the most common cases you’ll encounter. You can print it out and keep it in a binder, tape it to your wall, have it open on your computer desktop — whatever helps as you’re writing your paper.

Sometimes though you’ll encounter those less common cases, and it’s important to just know that you can Google for these anytime that they arise. No one expects you to just memorize everything having to do with MLA citation. Even people who write in MLA style professionally have to look a lot of stuff up, so there’s no shame in doing so. And if you ever get confused or want someone to answer your questions about all of this, feel free to come by the Writing Center or to make an appointment with us on Navigate and we will do our best to help. Thank you very much.

Hello everyone and welcome to this video today on formatting a works cited list in MLA style. I am Ashley Squires, the Director of the Writing Center here at Avila, and I’m going to be your guide for today.

So just in case this is the first video you’re watching in this series, let’s quickly review the reasons why it’s important to cite your sources.

So first of all, and this is probably the one you have heard, citing sources gives credit to people for their original ideas and words. So when you cite a source you’re acknowledging that the ideas came from somewhere else and are the intellectual property of their original author.

Secondly, perhaps less well-known, citing sources helps your reader understand where your information is coming from. So if a reader is interested in following up on an example you provide or knowing more about where a fact comes from, showing the source allows them to go and find it themselves.

And finally, citing sources enhances your credibility as a writer. It shows that you have done your research and that you’re in conversation with what other people have written about your topic.

So what do we need in order to cite a source? Generally you need to do three things. First of all you need to provide quotation marks anytime you’re quoting from another source directly. You need to provide an in-text or a parenthetical citation — the two terms are interchangeable, in-text or parenthetical — anytime you quote, paraphrase, or discuss a source in your writing. And then finally you need to provide a complete list of works cited at the end of your paper.

So in a previous video we covered in-text citations or parenthetical citations and now I’m going to talk about item number three — the works cited page.

So one quick thing that you should probably know before we get into this is that there are lots and lots of different citation systems out there. So at some point you might have been reading a book and noticed that it had footnotes — and if it has footnotes it likely follows the Chicago Manual of Style. You might have taken a psychology class and your instructor asked you to use APA style. So all of these different citation standards, all of these different systems, are actually provided by different publishers and different academic organizations. So for example the Chicago University Press publishes the Chicago Manual of Style, the Modern Languages Association puts out the MLA Handbook, and the American Psychological Association puts out the APA manual.

So which citation system a professional is going to use depends really on where they’re publishing — different journals want different styles. But certain formats tend to dominate within certain disciplines. So APA is the most common one for the social sciences, so if you’re taking a psychology or an economics class then you will probably be required to use APA if you’re writing a paper. Whereas Chicago and MLA are most common in the humanities, which is why MLA tends to come up a lot in English classes.

So for you as a student, which format you pick really depends on what your instructor or your program wants. If they haven’t said which one they want, then MLA is not a bad one to go with because especially its in-text citation system tends to be a little bit easier to manage than the other two. But that’s just kind of my opinion.

So that we can look at how to format a works cited page I am actually going to switch over here to Google Docs. This is part of an MLA template that I created and which is linked on the handouts page of the Writing Center website, and I’ll also provide a link to this in the description of the video on YouTube.

So this is an MLA template that you can use to format any paper that you have to write in MLA style. It will help you get the paragraph formatting right, the spacing right, block quotes, etc. and gives you some examples of how to do the different citations. So if we scroll down here to the works cited, we can talk about some basic rules for how these things are supposed to be formatted.

First of all, a works cited list is exactly what it sounds like — it is a comprehensive list of all the sources that you have used while writing your paper, even if you only used one. You still have to include a works cited page.

What may not be so obvious is the reason why it’s here and like why you have to do this even if you only have one source, and what relationship this works cited list has to your in-text citations. So some students don’t quite understand why it is we have to do both, so I’m going to explain why.

So remember back when I talked about why we cite sources and I said that the second big reason is so that your reader can follow up on what you’ve done, so they could go and track down your sources if they wanted to use them. Well in order for your reader to be able to do that they need several pieces of information — they need like the title of the article, the journal it was published in, the pages in the journal that the article appears on, the year it was published — you know, they need lots of different pieces of information.

If we were to put all of that information into the text every time we cited a source, that text would start looking pretty ugly and it would just be full of redundant information because it would be necessary to repeat all of that every time you cited a particular source. So the parenthetical citation is designed to give the reader just enough information that they could go look up the full reference at the end of the paper.

You know, it’s kind of like the same reason why we don’t just drop long URLs into the middle of a webpage — because it just looks really ugly to have all of that text, which sometimes goes on for multiple lines, just in the middle of an article. Instead we use hyperlinks and the hyperlink just gives us something short that we can click that will take us to the full piece of information, that will take us to the original source. And you can kind of think of the relationship between parenthetical citations and the works cited as like an analog version of a hyperlink in an online article — it’s just giving you a little bit of information that takes you to the big bit of information.

And if you’re wondering why we don’t just put URLs or links in the middle of this kind of thing — well first of all, you know, an academic essay is originally an analog format. We’re assuming that maybe somebody will print this out and read it that way and so won’t be able to use links. And also because again you know URLs are kind of ugly. So this is how we do it when writing academic papers — we kind of assume a reader who might be reading it on paper and for whom a link wouldn’t work, and so we do our little analog links with parenthetical citations that point towards the full works cited entry.

Okay so like I said, in order for a works cited entry to be really useful to a reader it needs to contain lots of information. And in order for it to be readable we want that information to appear in a very predictable way. That’s why we need a system like MLA style or like APA style, because if everybody was just out there kind of doing their own thing then it would be pretty difficult to decipher a typical references list. The idea behind these systems is that I should be able to go to a journal or to a book that uses MLA style and when I’m looking for references I will know where to look and I will know what to expect when I am looking at them. I’ll know generally that I should be seeing everything with the last name of the author first for example, and that the page numbers will appear somewhere at the end if there are page numbers that need to be included. You know, I need to know what to expect when I’m looking at these things, and so that’s why there’s a system, that’s where all these little rules that we have to follow come from.

If that feels overwhelming, let me just say you can relax a little bit. I’m going to give you just three basic rules for how a works cited page should be formatted in general and then explain that for the rest you don’t have to memorize anything — you can just keep some kind of reference pages handy and that will help you with the rest.

But here are three basic rules for what you have to do with a works cited page.

Okay first of all the works cited page is alphabetized. In MLA we always alphabetize the entries by the last name of the first author, and that is regardless of what order the sources are used in in the paper. Okay, always by the last name of the first author — it’s not by like which source you used first or anything like that.

Because we use alphabetization, it is not necessary to include any numbers or bullet points with these entries. Okay, if you use a citation generator like Grammarly — and let me just say right off the bat these are fine to use, if you like using them you should continue to do so if you find them useful — but sometimes they will add numbers to your list and all the numbers really mean is like this is the order that you entered these sources into the citation generator tool. It doesn’t really mean anything other than that and it’s not really proper MLA style to have numbers. And so anytime you get a list spit back to you from one of these tools just go ahead and delete the numbers or delete the bullet points. Definitely don’t add them on your own — it should just look like this, no numbers, no bullets.

Okay so that’s rule number two. First rule — alphabetize your entries. Second rule — don’t include numbers. And finally here’s the third rule.

So the third rule has to do with the spacing. Instead of bullets what we’re using here is called a hanging indent, so that it’s easy to see where one entry ends and the next one begins.

So you’re probably familiar with indentation already — that’s what we call it when we set off one line of the text or multiple lines of the text a little bit further from the margin than the rest of the text. So when you tab over at the beginning of a paragraph that’s called an indentation. Works cited entries use the opposite form of indentation from a typical paragraph. So in a typical paragraph it’s just the first line that’s half an inch from the left margin. In MLA format it is the first line of the entry that is flush with the left margin and all the subsequent lines are a half an inch away from the original line.

So let me show you how to do this in Google Docs. There are ways to automate this in just about any word processing software that you happen to be using — it’s easy to look up the instructions if you need to, but I can just show you how to do it in Google Docs right here.

So if you go up to your menu at the top and go to Format, go over here to Align and Indent, and go to Indentation Options. So here you get several options — what these would do is they would allow you to bump the indent over a certain amount of space on the right or left for all of your lines. But down here under Special Indent you have the option to indent the first line as you would for a normal paragraph, and to create a hanging indent. So let’s see what it would look like with no hanging indent — let’s change it to none. Okay so that’s what it would look like without the hanging indent. Now to create the hanging indent again I go to Align and Indent menu, I go to Indentation Options, Special Indent, Hanging. And then if it’s not already set to 0.5 inches as a default go ahead and set that and hit Apply, and voilà — all of your entries have a hanging indent. So that way you don’t have to do hard returns and tabs and all of that stuff, it just automatically formats every single entry.

Okay so those are the three basic rules of formatting. But then there is formatting these references themselves, and this is where things can feel a little bit overwhelming, because every single different type of source — whether it’s a book or an electronic journal or a documentary or a social media post — has its own citation format, its own rules about the order that information is supposed to appear in and where all these little punctuation marks go. And that means that the list of possibilities is absolutely huge, which is why these manuals are published as books.

So what are you as a student supposed to do? Well first of all I recommend that you just relax a little bit, because nobody memorizes all of this stuff. Everything that you could possibly want to know about formatting references in MLA is Googleable. There was a day back when I was a college student when you had to have that MLA manual out on your desk to figure this stuff out, but now you can just Google for it.

Okay now you can just Google for whatever exotic type of entry you want to find — whether it’s how to cite a documentary, how to cite a TikTok, how to cite a podcast. It’s easy to find, you will get hundreds of thousands of results for any of these. That also means it’s not necessary to email your instructor about it because I guarantee they have to look this stuff up too.

Some recommendations I have — go ahead and bookmark the official MLA website and the Purdue OWL, which is kind of a big comprehensive resource on everything you need to know about MLA citation style.

There are of course, like I said, free citation generators out there — it’s fine to use them. Do be aware that they have quirks, these are free tools, sometimes you get what you pay for. They don’t necessarily alphabetize your entries, sometimes they put numbers on them — just be prepared to go in and fix stuff like that.

And finally, while there are definitely hundreds or even thousands of possible formats out there, there are really like five that you’re going to use the vast majority of the time — like a book, a book chapter, a journal, a news article, a website without an author, etc. So what we in the Writing Center have done is we’ve put them into this quick reference sheet so that you can just print it out and tape it to your wall or keep it open in your browser, however it is it’s best for you. I’m going to link this handout in the YouTube description but you can also find it by just going directly to the Writing Center page on the Avila website. And then when you need one of these more exotic reference types, just Google for it. Like I said, don’t email your teacher to ask — just cut out the middleman, save yourself some time waiting for them to answer, just Google it.

Okay so here’s my very last recommendation. You can save yourself a little bit of stress if you don’t wait until the very end of the project to do the references or to do the works cited page. My recommendation is to just kind of populate it as you go. Once you find a source you want to use in your paper, scroll down to the last page of your draft and type out the fully formatted works cited entry. This really will save you a lot of headaches, because there have been times when I was writing and used a source and even dropped in an in-text reference and then I forgot to go back and do the full works cited entry, came back a few days later, couldn’t remember where I got the article or what database it came from — it’s a big hassle. Save yourself the time, save yourself the stress, keep a running list of your references as you go.

And as a side note, there are citation management systems out there that can keep this running list for you as you do your research. They can be really nice — stuff like EndNote or Zotero. I know a lot of people who like them. In my experience they tend to be better for long-term research projects, so like your final thesis or maybe a term paper. If it’s a course paper that just needs like three to five sources then it may not actually really save you any time and you might just be better off keeping this running list manually. But they’re available out there and many people do find them useful.

So this brings us to the end of our video. I recognize that MLA citation can feel a little bit overwhelming, so if you ever want to talk about it or just have someone check that you’re doing your works cited correctly, feel free to drop by or make an appointment with the Writing Center and we will be happy to help. Thank you for watching.