FYS100 -- Greening The Campus -- Fall 2016: Writing Your Paper

Online documents make it very easy to cut and paste information without thinking and without giving proper credit. Make sure you understand how to cite your sources.

 The OWL at Purdue is an excellent online resource to help you cite properly.

You may also want to utilize a Free Citation Tool to help you format your citations.

The Writing Center  offers free sessions with peer tutors to discuss your writing. Sessions are interactive and will engage you in discussion of your paper to guide you in developing your ideas and practicing revising and editing strategies.

When it is time to gather all of your notes and start writing the paper, avoid the most common mistake - plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only taking large parts of someone else's work and not attributing credit to that author; paraphrasing sections of a work, even using synonyms and citing the work, is also plagiarism.

• Use direct quotations to support the paper's thesis.
• Rethink and rewrite the author's original idea and express it in a new way.

Even if the ideas are rewritten, the source of the idea must be cited and the author given credit.

For further information, see

• the section on plagiarism in the Gingrich Guide 
• interactive site at University of Texas at Austin
• interactive site at Prentice Hall publishers
• or the material on paraphrasing from the OWL at Purdue.