Unless explicitly
instructed otherwise, your take-home assignments work
must provide a complete listing of all sources used.
Unless you are using footnotes that provide complete
citations, include either a "Bibliography" or "Works
Cited" section even if you have used only one source.
For take-home
examinations or papers, use and cite only the assigned
reading materials. With the exception of
assignments that explicitly are supposed to incorporate
independent research, I assess the content and analysis of
papers by looking at how effectively they engage and apply
the assigned course materials. For reference purposes, you
may find it occasionally useful to examine academic
journal articles or other high-quality sources beyond
those that have been assigned; however, you may not
substitute similar readings for your assigned materials.
In no case should you rely on an encyclopedia, web site
searchers, or similar materials in lieu of using your
assigned readings to write your essay. If you have a
question about using outside sources, ask before turning
in your paper.
Whenever possible, cite assigned readings rather
than the class lectures. When I assign papers, I
am using these assignments to assess the extent to which
students are competing course readings, such that it is
obvious that they understand and can apply concepts and
evidence from the assigned readings. If you reference
class lectures when similar material and evidence are available
in the readings, the presumption will be that you are not
doing the readings. In the bigger picture, part of
political science’s claim to being a “science” is the idea
that the findings reported by social scientists should be
easy to replicate by others looking at the same body of
evidence. When you cite a source that is widely available
and provide your readers with the best information about
where they can review the pages of the document you are
citing, your readers can then verify your interpretation
of these materials. In short, you should not cite your
instructor unless you have to because this material is not
something that can be easily accessed by most people. If
you feel that you must use material from my lectures, you
must cite this material (Setzler lecture, October 11,
2017).
Without exception, instances of plagiarism will be reported to the Provost's office and Student Honor Court, and it will be punished according to university policy. Plagiarism is any act where a student attempts to gain academic credit by representing as their own writing and ideas work that has been copied or paraphrased from the work of another author, the internet, or another student. If ideas and writing in your essay are not your own, they need to have proper citation. If any phrasing in your writing is being lifted directly from another source, you must put quotation marks around it, and include a page-specific citation.
You must cite material when you are paraphrasing, Paraphrasing
is when writers borrow ideas from another author,
substantially reworking that author's wording for use in
the student's writing. The general ideas and evidence come
from someone else, but you are presenting them completely
in your own wording and structure. It is perfectly
acceptable to paraphrase other writer's writing as long as
you give the original writer credit with appropriate
citation. In fact, paraphrasing is one of the best ways to
support your arguments and to show that you are completing
assigned readings. When you carefully rework and apply
other authors' ideas to advance your argument, you are
demonstrating that you understand what you are reading,
which will improve your paper grades. When paraphrasing,
writers need to cite the other authors' work by enclosing
the paraphrased materials with references that note their
source. For example: As the historian Michelle Smith
notes, plagiarism is the leading form of academic
dishonesty in American colleges (2012, 34). In this case,
the beginning of the borrowed idea is denoted by a
reference to its author, and it is clearly terminated with
a citation listing the year of the author's work (which
would be cited fully in the bibliography) and the page
number on which this idea was located in the cited work.
The absence of quotation marks indicates that the phrasing
of the paraphrased material is that of the author rather
than Professor Smith. If you are shifting back and forth
between your own ideas and those of other authors, place
citation at the end of section of the other authors' ideas
each time you transition between their ideas and your own.
Do not "patchwrite"; it is a type of
plagiarism. Patchwriting is when an author
copies phrases, sentences, or even whole paragraphs from
another writer and then makes only very modest
modifications to the lifted passages, such as substituting
some of the words with synonyms or shifting the order of
words around so that it is less obvious that the writing
is not the student author's own work. Even when citations
are added at the end of a lifted passage, patch writing is
basically the same as copying another writer verbatim
without quotation marks since you are completely
replicating the meaning and structure of the original
authors without giving them full credit. This practice is
intellectually dishonest and a violation of the honor code
because it amounts to deceptively presenting other
persons' work as though it were your own writing and
thinking. Take the time to carefully think through how
other authors' views, ideas, and evidence can advance your
argument and make sure to put those authors' points into
your own words before you cite that material.
You should typically avoid long quotations and never
start a paragraph with a quotation, For the papers
assigned in my courses, I am looking for and assessing your
writer's voice, ideas, and writing. When you use long
quotes to convey ideas that could be presented in your own
words and voice, it looks like a lazy replacement of the
required work rather than evidence you are carefully
reviewing and analyzing readings. Do not start paragraphs
with a quoted sentence from another author; your
well-crafted topic sentences should start paragraphs,
summarizing the main argument of the paragraph and link
back to your thesis statement so that it is clear how the
paragraph will be advancing the main theme of the
essay.
This doesn't mean you should avoid quotations
altogether. You should support your argument with
different types of evidence, including data, examples, and
short quoted phrases. Make sure that your short quotations
(no more than a sentence or so) add a unique perspective
to your essay and that they obviously support the point
you are making. The idea here is that quoted material
should emphasize ideas that wouldn't be as well put or
effective if you simply had paraphrased the original idea.
When you use direct quotations. In most analytical writing, you will find that word-for-word quotes are very short--fewer than ten words--unless the author is presenting someone's first-hand account of a key event.
When you use statistics, specific facts that are not well known, or examples of well reasoned logic and examples that represent another author's careful analysis or thinking on a topic rather than widely known, general information.
With paraphrased material, which is when you summarize the main ideas of another author in your own words. See the explanation above about the key differences between paraphrasing and patch-writing.
To support your argument
by demonstrating that other experts have reached the
same conclusion you have. Sometimes, we use
citation instead of logic or examples to support a minor
point that is relevant to an argument, but not something
that needs to be discussed in any detail. Basically, this
is an argument sustained by an appeal to authority rather
than to logical explanation.
Carefully distinguish
between your own analysis and the works you are citing.
If an entire paragraph is paraphrased from a single page
of a source, a citation at the end of the paragraph will
suffice. If the material used to write a paragraph comes
from different pages or several sources (Jones 1999, 87),
you should place a page-specific cite every time the
source/page of the material has changed (Elster 1991b,
45). You should do the same if some of the material in a
paragraph is paraphrased from a source (Setzler 2005, 2),
but other parts of the paragraph are your own ideas and
analysis.
You must provide page-specific citations throughout your essay. All materials used to write your papers should be cited throughout your essay, even if an essay incorporates only the required class readings and does not quote any material directly.
You must appropriately
format and punctuate your citations and bibliography.
Please do not make up your own citation style. In
lower-division courses, unless the directions on an
assignment specifically indicate otherwise, you may use
APSA, Chicago, APA, or MLA formatting as long as you are
consistent in your format choice throughout your paper.
Unless otherwise stated, you must use the American
Political Science Association format for all take-home
essays in my upper-division courses. For your convenience,
I have uploaded a
handout from Texas A&M's writing center that
summarizes the APSR format.
Locate the punctuation correctly when using direct quotes and parenthetical citations. Here are some examples of how you use punctuation with "direct quotes" in various types of sentences with parenthetical citation (Smith 2014, 3). Notice that "with commas or periods," the closing quotation marks, go "after the punctuation"; however, with "semi-colons or dashes," the quotations marks are placed before these rarer types of punctuation. If you have a citation at the end of of a dependent clause that refers only to that material (Smith 2013, 65), the comma goes after the parenthetical citation. This also is the case with "sentence's ending period" (Smith 2016, 26).
When you have any doubts about how to properly cite a source or format your bibliography, always consult a style book. Do not give up just because formatting your citation and bibliographies properly is hard at first. Over time, you will learn how to consistently and correctly provide and format citations. The sooner you acquire these skills, the easier major research projects will be to complete. If you need additional help or resources, you have lots of options: see me, my webpage handout on the APSR format of citation, a writing manual chapter on citation I have placed on the website, or a Smith Library reference librarian so that you can obtain a style guide in the library.
You must use proper citation and pagination for electronic sources and class reading materials. The point of citation is to make sure that other people can verify your interpretation of other scholars' work. Thus, as a rule, you want to cite materials such that they could be located by the largest audience possible. When using on-line assignments from the class website or materials obtained from the library reserves, you should list the original pagination of the cited materials if it is available:
To cite a photocopied or
scanned article from an electronic source course packet
(i.e. whenever it is possible to see the original page
numbering), you can just include information about the
original source (here, I am using APSA
formatting)::
Smith, Ann. 2016. "Democracy's Modern Challenges." Journal of Democracy 23 (Fall): 112-142.
If a reading assignment either does not include the original author's pagination or does not provide a complete citation, you should cite specific page numbers as listed in the reserve assignment, and then note your the material's "compiler." Again using APSA formatting as an example:
Smith, Ann. 2016. "Democracy's Modern Challenges." Journal of Democracy 23 (Fall): 112-142. Reserve Reading. Comp. Professor Robert Smith. High Point University, Spring Semester 2012.
Alternatively, you can cite the material as having coming from an electronic source if your professor provides reading materials in this fashion:
Smith, Ann. 2016. "Democracy's Modern Challenges." Journal of Democracy 23 (Fall): 112-142. <https://www.marksetzler.org/PolSys/ CPSassignS2010.htm>. Accessed: January 20, 2012.
If the materials are not numbered in any way or have no date of publication, you should consult a style-book to determine how to deal with this (this varies by style choice). If you are using APSR formatting (parenthetical citation) and found that the reading assignment listed above did not include page numbers, you would use "Np" in your parenthetical citations of Ann Smith's article (Smith 2010, Np). Similarly, documents without any date are listed "Nd" in APSR formatting.
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