This is the sixth of seven video modules in Langara Library's Avoiding Plagiarism Tutorial. It demonstrates how to incorporate the words of others into your own writing through quotations. It includes tips on effective quoting from Langara instructors.
Video Transcript:
Narrator: Now that you know more about plagiarism and citations, you can do your research and start writing your paper. To avoid plagiarism, integrate sources into your assignments with correct quotations and paraphrasing. You can ensure you do this in a few ways. One is to quote only key passages. Another is to try to avoid using very long quotations especially in short assignments. If you do you need to use a long quotation, be sure to structure it as a block quotation. Later in this tutorial, we'll point you to writing resources that can help you with that. Excessive quotation suggests you're not thinking enough for yourself.
Now, we'll go through some examples of quoting and paraphrasing. Please note that we'll be using APA style citations in the examples in this section. Let's start by looking at this next example from an article published in the technology magazine Wired in December of 2012. Feel free to pause the video at any time to take a closer look at the examples provided.
Here's a passage from the Wired article as it appeared in the original text, and here is improperly quoted passage. This passage is improperly quoted because there are no quotation marks around the original author's words. It's also missing an in-text citation giving credit to the original author.
Here's a properly quoted passage from the Wired article. This is because the use of the original author's name clearly conveys the source of the information. As well, there a quotation marks around the original author's words and there's an in-text citation giving credit to the original author.
Here's some advice from a Langara instructor about how to use quotations in your assignments.
Psychology Instructor: Another tip I give the students is to use quotation marks and give the page number when quoting a quotable quote. That is, a profound or specific statement that requires repeating word-for-word. If this statement does not fit this criteria, I suggest the student simply paraphrases the statement.