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Table of Contents
Week 2—Plagiarism, Copyright Violation, and MLA Style
- Week 1—Getting Started What You’ll Find in This Packet - Assignment - Quiz - Assignment - Quiz - Week 3—Websites - Assignment - Quiz
- Week 4—Periodicals - Assignment - Quiz
- Week 5—Databases - Assignment - Quiz
- Week 6—Using Your Library - Assignment - Quiz - Week 7—Editing - Assignment - Quiz - Final Project - Course Evaluation - Additional Materials - Informal Outline - Fair Use Checklist - Copyright Terms - Judging Websites - Dewey/LC Systems - Works Cited
Week 1—Getting Started
The Basics
Many English classes cover the basics of writing a paper. You all know the rules by now: begin your paper with a thesis statement, give three paragraphs of supporting evidence, then wrap up with a conclusion. Good advice, but the process of writing a research paper actually begins several steps earlier. You should have six things in hand before you start writing: A research statement Three to six subtopics to explore A thesis statement A collection of supporting evidence A conclusion Citation information for all your sources This class helps you through the agonizing process of getting started in college‐level research and writing. Nearly everybody, even professional researchers, feel overwhelmed when given a research assignment. There's just too much to handle. Topics! Sources! Evaluation! Synthesis! Citation! Research becomes less intimidating if you break the process down, step by step. Start with a research statement. A research statement is a rough idea of a topic you want to write about. (It's not the same thing as a thesis statement; keep reading for more detail.) The research statement is for you and you alone; no one else ever has to see it. It can be just one word ("Mars", "Copper", "Periodontology") or it can be a complete sentence ("My paper is about the interaction between prophylids and howler monkeys in pre‐Columbian Mesoamerica"). The point is to help organize your thinking by nailing down a topic of interest to you. Next, make a list of subtopics to explore. These subtopics fall under the broad heading of your research statement. If you chose the research statement "Mars", for example, then your list of subtopics to explore might include "Geology of Mars", "History of Mars Exploration", "Is There Life on Mars?" and "Mars in Mythology". Your research statement guides your research for the entire paper; your subtopics guide your research for particular pages in the paper, or even particular paragraphs. Warning: you should be able to come up with at least three subtopics. (Personally, I like to have five.) If you can't think of three specific areas to explore within the scope of your research statement, then your statement is too narrow and you won't be able to write a lengthy paper about it. Go back and rewrite your research statement to make it broader. Alternatively, you may be thinking of dozens of subtopics and it's hard to know which ones to write about. In this case, rewrite the research statement to make it narrower. You want to have a good grip on your research before you start writing the paper. Nothing
A dictionary is a list of words, usually arranged alphabetically, accompanied by definitions for those words. Standard dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam‐Webster's Dictionary and Random House Dictionary , give not only a word's meaning but also its pronunciation, etymology (i.e. history and origins) and sometimes an illustration. Specialized dictionaries include rhyming dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries (which translate words from one language into another), and dictionaries that concentrate on scientific, medical, legal or business terms. There are also weird dictionaries that get very little use: lists of commonly misspelled words, dictionaries that arrange words by frequency of use ("the" is the most commonly used word in the English language), and reverse dictionaries, which allow you to look up a definition and find the word that goes with it. (Reverse dictionaries are hard to use and TC library doesn't buy them.) Encyclopedias include general articles on subjects of all kinds, arranged alphabetically by subject. Standard encyclopedias include the Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana, World Book and Compton's Encyclopedia. Specialized encyclopedias are also available. Note: generally speaking, encyclopedias are not acceptable sources for information in a college‐level research paper. You can use one to get started on a topic, and it may direct you to other sources you can use in the paper, but don't rely on an encyclopedia to give you material you can include in your main text. When using an encyclopedia, always start with the index. Your topic may be scattered across a variety of different articles, and a good index will list them all. Almanacs collect fast facts and lists of interesting data. Want to know the 10 most expensive restaurants on Earth? Who commanded the Prussians at the Battle of Waterloo? How much rain falls on Los Angeles in an average year? Bibliographies list sources of information on various topics. They include citations for books, magazines, newspaper articles, photographs, websites and other materials. Directories work a lot like bibliographies, but instead of books they list people, organizations and offices. The phone book is a directory. Books of quotations gather famous sayings, lines of poetry and clips from speeches, usually arranged by topic. An atlas is a collection of maps, usually grouped by geographic region. A good atlas will include an index and statistical or factual data. Standard atlases give political and geographic information, and sometimes economic data as well. Specialized atlases focus on transportation, geology, biology, history or other aspects of a particular place.
Assignment 1
Fill in ALL the following spaces. You may use any topic you wish, except “cats”. This is a practice exercise; you DO NOT need to conduct actual research or write a real paper. Since you are not really writing a paper here, the “Editing Phase” of the process has been left out. See the “Informal Outline” at the end of this packet for an example of what the assignment should look like. DO YOUR OWN WORK—EVERYONE SHOULD COME UP WITH SOMETHING DIFFERENT!
Research Phase
Research statement: Areas to explore in the research:
Writing Phase
Thesis statement: Supporting evidence:
Conclusion:
A. look up a pronunciation and find its word B. look up an etymology and find its word C. look up a word and find its definition D. look up a definition and find its word
- “Me” is the most commonly used word in the English language. TRUE FALSE
Week 2—Plagiarism, Copyright Violation, and MLA Style
Plagiarism and Copyright Violation
Most students have heard of plagiarism and copyright violation, and know that both things can get you into trouble. That said, the knowledge rarely seems to stop anybody. (Trust me on this. I teach school for a living.) Plagiarism means copying someone's work without giving credit to the author. Copyright violation means copying someone's work without getting permission first. In both cases, "copying" means a number of things—taking text, film or audio clips directly out of the original work; imitating someone's fundamental ideas; or slightly rephrasing a quotation so that it isn't exactly the same as the original sentence. You can be guilty of either one, both at the same time, or (if you’re smart) neither. Which one is worse? Well, colleges and creative industries (art, movie making, scientific research, technology development) come down hard on plagiarism, because these organizations make their living off of coming up with new and original ideas. Depending on the details of the case, plagiarism can get you expelled from school or sink your career. For examples of this happening, see the famous lawsuit between novelists Nora Roberts and Janet Dailey, after Dailey was caught copying pages out of Roberts's books. The historian Stephen Ambrose also landed in hot water over allegations of plagiarism, though I don't think he was ever sued. In this class, the penalty for plagiarism is a zero on the assignment or final project. Colleges tend to worry less about copyright violation, which is odd, because the penalties for copyright violation are much more severe. Someone who feels their copyright has been infringed can sue for lots of money—federal guidelines suggest $500,000 per infraction—and can also demand a public apology and the recall of all published work that contains copyrighted material. So how do you stay out of trouble? Avoiding plagiarism is pretty easy: just be careful to give credit to your sources, using a formal citation style (more on that later). Avoiding copyright violation is trickier—copyright law is horrifyingly complicated and gets worse with every passing day. The only way to make absolutely sure you're safe is to contact the author of the work and request written permission to use the material. However, even if you can't get permission or can't reach the author, you can sometimes still use the material.
Fair Use
Researchers—particularly students—do have some rights under copyright law. For one thing, copyright doesn't last forever. Under current American law an author can hold copyright for the entire length of his life, plus 70 years after death. This rule is fairly standard in most first‐world countries; the same time period applies in the European Union, Australia and Russia. Many other countries, including Canada, Hong Kong, Japan and New Zealand still follow a "life plus 50" rule. All materials published in the U.S. before 1923 are automatically in the public domain. (Materials in the
you're not hurting the author's sales by copying their work. If you're not sure whether your particular use of a work falls under the protection Fair Use, Indiana University put together a checklist that might help you—see the additional materials at the end of this packet.
MLA Style
I keep saying that you have to give credit to all your sources when you write a paper. What does "giving credit" mean, exactly? It means that other people can find the sources you used. Simply saying "I heard this from some guy in a bar" isn't good enough. You must declare exactly what he said, as well as the guy's name, the date of the conversation, and the fact that you yourself spoke to him in person. Citing the source this way takes the heat off of you—if people who read the finished paper have a problem with what he said, they can track the guy down and argue with him themselves. Some college students conduct their own interviews when writing a paper, but that's unusual. Most people rely on books, websites, articles from newspapers or magazines, or database searches. When citing these sources you must give specific information that helps your readers get hold of that book, website, article or whatever else you used. What information do you have to give? In this class, we follow the citation rules of the Modern Language Association (MLA). According to the MLA, you must give the following information for a book: Last Name, First Name. Title. Place: Publisher, Date. Perino, Sheila C., and Joseph Perino. Parenting the Gifted: Developing the Promise. New York: R.R. Bowker, 1981. Dorson, Richard M., ed. Patriots of the American Revolution: True Accounts by Great Americans, from Ethan Allen to George Rogers Clark. New York: Gramercy Books, 1953. Notice that the first line of the citation is up against the left‐hand side of the page, while every line after that is indented five spaces. In MLA style all your citations should be done this way. Notice also that the period after the title is not underlined; that the important words in the title are capitalized, and that when a book has more than one author, only the first author's name is in reverse order. MLA style, like all other citation styles, is very, very picky about details. Pay attention to those periods and commas. Finally, don't be afraid to say "I don't know." When you're writing a paper, you're trying to give an accurate picture of a subject, including aspects of that subject that are still being studied. If your sources are unclear, or seem unreliable, then say so. Try to find the strongest evidence available, but don't make something up if your sources won't support it. In some fields—medieval history springs to mind—nobody ever really knows anything. Admitting ignorance isn't wrong if you can show that the experts are as much in the dark as you are.
Assignment 2
For each of the following scenarios, decide whether or not the suggested use of a work violates copyright law. Write three or four sentences to explain your reasoning in each case. Some of these questions have more than one possible answer; I will accept even a “wrong” answer, provided you can justify your decision. Hint: take a look at the “Fair Use Checklist” at the end of this packet.
- A school theater wishes to put on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (first published around 1600). The director makes 25 photocopies of a published script, copying the entire script each time. The performance charges admission, but all proceeds go to the school drama department.
- A student newspaper on campus wants to reprint an article that appeared in a commercial magazine. The editor writes to the magazine, requesting permission to publish the article, but doesn’t hear back in time for publication. The newspaper goes ahead and publishes it anyway. The newspaper is part of the college’s journalism club and is distributed to the public free of charge.
- Four math students create a dramatic class presentation on the quadratic equation, featuring interpretive dance set to the soundtrack from The Phantom of the Opera. The teacher likes it so much he puts a video of the presentation on YouTube, after asking permission from the students but not from Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of the music.
- A great scientist discovers the formula for eternal life and publishes it in a lengthy, poetic paper filled with colorful descriptions of the wonderful things it can do for humanity. The paper is widely copied and used in political commentary, advertising and litter boxes.
FALSE
- You can be guilty of copyright violation while being innocent of plagiarism. TRUE FALSE
Week 3—Websites
Searching the Internet
This course doesn’t actually require you to have internet access, which makes this week a little strange. I’m going to show you examples of internet searches, and I welcome you to follow along if you do have a connection. If you don’t, well, use your imagination. Think you know how to search the internet? Guess again. There are dozens of search engines out there—Alltheweb, Altavista, Ask, Clusty, Dogpile, Exalead, Findsounds, Gigablast, Google, Intelways, Live Search, Picsearch, Searchmash, Srchr, Yahoo!, and many others. These search engines make it very easy to bury yourself under a mountain of garbage, but finding good, reliable, accurate information on the internet requires skill. Websites can be valuable sources of information, and you shouldn't hesitate to use them in a college paper, but you have to be careful about the websites you choose. (A note about terminology. "Internet" and "world wide web" are often used interchangeably, but they're not quite the same thing. The world wide web is a big part of the internet—it includes all websites whose addresses begin with "www"—but the internet also includes many small networks that are not part of the web. Password‐protected or employee‐only networks are part of the internet but not the web. Then there are other "websites" that just don't use a www prefix; see http://icasualties.org for an example.) So how do you search the internet properly? Well, first you need to decide what you're looking for. Let's say we need the lyrics to the song "Don't Break My Heart". Go to Google (www.google.com) and type in don't break my heart
websites that do not contain that word. Look farther down the screen. You'll see Where your keywords show up. In the drop‐down menu next to that, choose in the title of the page. Now our search is down to just 1,980 results—Google is finding websites that contain our search terms in the title of the website. (That's the title of the website, not necessarily the title of the song.) We can narrow it further—limit the search to websites in English, and require those websites to contain numbers between 1990 and 1999. Now the search has been cut down to just 20 websites, one of which is probably the song we're looking for. When the search starts to get really detailed, the search restrictions sometimes collide with one another. We did tell Google not to show us any webpages with UB40 in them, but I notice that UB40 has crept into the search results again. The program isn't perfect. No search engine is. Other search engines offer similar search options and use similar commands to make the search happen.
Judging Websites
As I said earlier, it's very easy to find bad information on the internet, but it can be a lot harder to find sources you can trust. How do you know the website isn't lying to you? Even when they're being honest, how do you know they've done serious research or know their topic thoroughly? There are three things to watch out for when judging a website: authority, accuracy, and currency.
Authority involves the author of a website. Do they know what they're talking about? Do they have an incentive to lie to you? On many websites, you can't even tell who the author is. Here are some clues that the author might be reliable: ‐The author's name appears on the website. ‐The author offers credentials or qualifications (i.e. a PhD in the subject, twenty years experience doing this kind of research, etc.) ‐The website includes the author's contact information, such as an email address or telephone number. This tells you that they are willing to stand behind their words. If you want to make really certain the information is reliable, you can speak to them directly and ask for details. ‐The website was recommended to you by another source (in other words, it was listed in someone's bibliography or mentioned elsewhere as a good source of information). ‐The author has no particular bias (or, if they do, they admit it). In other words, the author tries to present all sides of an issue and doesn't push one point of view. In cases where some bias is unavoidable, the author is honest about it. For example: "This drug evaluation was funded by Pfizer corporation, which makes the drug in question." ‐The website has a respectable top‐level domain. The top‐level domain is the three‐letter code that appears at the end of a web address; it's the .edu in www.taftcollege.edu. This particular domain is reserved for websites that belong to a college or university, and information from a .edu website is generally more reliable than information from other websites. (Not always, though. Many student webpages are hosted on a university server. Just because a website has a .edu domain name doesn't necessarily mean the material on it was written by a professor.) Other domains to watch for: .gov (websites belonging to a state or national government, usually considered trustworthy); .com (short for "commercial", usually used by businesses, may or may not be trustworthy); .org (short for "organization", usually used by nonprofit organizations, may or may not be trustworthy); .net (short for "network", often personal websites or vanity pages, most of which are junk). Accuracy has to do with the content of the website. Based on what you already know, does the information seem reliable? Are there obvious errors? Are there blank spots where essential information is missing? Clues for judging accuracy: ‐The website includes a bibliography. ‐The website is carefully designed—spelling and grammar have been checked, graphs are properly labeled, and the images are relevant to the text. ‐The website contains information that can be corroborated. In other words, the information on the site matches information you found in other sources. When your sources contradict one another, you have to think carefully about which one you trust more.
information, you have to leave it out. Be careful about doing this on the citations for assignments or the final project—remember that I will be looking for those things, and I want to be sure you didn't just forget about them. Also, pay attention to the fact that the URL is not blue or underlined, and there is no period after the date of access. Form #2: "Specific Page or Section Title." Website Title. Editor. Date of Creation. Publisher. Date of Access . Pluto. Ed. Bill Arnett. 15 Sept. 2006. 23 Oct. 2007 http://www.nineplanets.org/pluto.html. Here, again, I've had to leave out the publisher, and this time I had to leave out the "Specific Page or Section Title" as well. There's a lot of confusion over the difference between a section title and the website title. The website title is the title of the homepage, while a section title is the title of a particular webpage that you reached off of that homepage. In the example above, Pluto is underlined because it's the homepage for information on Pluto. Any links off of that ("Atmosphere of Pluto"; "Gravity of Pluto"; "Pluto's Orbit") would be considered sections, and those section titles would be placed inside quotation marks. There are also issues surrounding the URL. Do you have to cite the entire URL, with all its meaningless letters and numbers, or only the part up until the domain name? Here's what the MLA Handbook says: Ideally, the URL of the exact document you consulted should be given. Sometimes, however, the URL of a document is so long and complicated that reproducing it would invite transcription errors or would at least cause inconvenience. In such instances, it is preferable to give instead the URL of the site's search page, if such a page exists....If an internet site does not assign a specific URL to each document and if citing a search page is not appropriate, give the URL of the site's home page (212). Give as much information as is really useful. You should always include the URL up as far as the top‐level domain; you might include a bit more beyond that, but not if it's all gibberish (i.e. 67889%94982348%B184350%A9034). Don't underline the URL or make it blue—Microsoft Word tends to do that automatically, so hit backspace if it does. The Handbook offers a few more examples on pages 216 ‐217. Note that all these examples are for complete websites (that is, homepages) and not for sections. Watch out for that difference.
Assignment 3
The following page shows you a fake website that I created JUST FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT. (Don’t you feel special?) Evaluate this website, using the guide to judging websites at the end of this packet. Don’t bother to look for this site on the web—it exists only on my computer.
- Cite the website, using the information provided below. Author: Robin F. Winchell IV Title: Mariana vs. Puerto Rico: Which is Better? Date: March 21, 2008 Publisher: unknown Place of publication: unknown Number of pages: 1 Date of access: March 24, 2008 URL: http://www.ihatemariana.net
- What clues make you think this site might be trustworthy?
- What clues make you think this site might be untrustworthy?
- If you were searching the internet for information about this topic, what would you type into your search engine?
- Approximately how deep is the Puerto Rico Trench? (You can use print sources to answer this, if you don’t have internet access.)
- Approximately how deep is the Mariana Trench? (You can use print sources to answer this, if you don’t have internet access.)
