Take Careful Notes

Copying and pasting is not necessarily plagiarism. Look at it this way: What did people do to write research papers before the Internet and cheap photocopies? They went to the library with a stack of note cards and wrote down summaries, quotes, and paraphrases, carefully noting the page number of each piece of information. You can do the same basic thing with your computer. Think of the process as creating electronic note cards.

Step 1. Prewrite and research.

Let’s pretend you’re writing the paper in MLA style for your English Composition 100 class. The broad topic is the First Amendment. Using the brainstorming method, you narrow the topic to freedom of speech, narrow it again to hate speech, and go looking for sources. After a quick search on one of the library’s databases, you find you can narrow the topic even further to Internet hate speech, or cyberhate. Gather your sources and record all the bibliographic information. To save time, have your citation style handbook (MLA, APA, Chicago, CBE) handy (or go to the citation styles section of this website) and type in the information in the required format. That way, there’s little chance you will leave out a required piece of information. And if you have a full citation, you’ll be able to find the source again in no time.

Here’s a source that would be valuable for your cyberhate paper.

Leets, Laura. “Responses to Internet Hate Sites: Is Speech Too Free in Cyberspace?.” Communication Law and Policy 6.2 (Fall 2001): 287-317. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Mantor Library, University of Maine at Farmington. 10 June 2002 <http://ehostvgw3.epnet.com>.

(You found the source on a database, so the citation must show the path you took to find the article. This citation does not look exactly as it should in your list of works cited. It should be formatted with hanging indents. To see proper format of citations, go to Citation styles.)

See this citation in APA style or Chicago style.

Step 2. Choose a passage from the source.

Here’s an excerpt of the Leets source:

Hate-based Web sites have grown dramatically in recent years. In 1995 at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, there was only one hate site¹ but today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center² and the Anti-Defamation League³ have documented about 2,800 hate sites. The Internet has put the problem of incendiary hate into sharp relief, raising many difficult political, legal and social questions. Consequently, the American debate regarding censorship of hate speech is moving from traditional forms to newer ones found on-line. In particular, the Internet has become a key organizing tool for hate groups.⁴ As scholars have noted, the Internet is a powerful forum of communication with its broad reach, interactivity and multi-media capability to disseminate information.⁵ The Web is providing an unprecedented vehicle for forging communities⁶ and making communication quicker, easier and cheaper. These features inevitably result in questions about impact, especially when viewed as empowering racists and other extremists.

(In a note that contains footnotes, like the one above, include the footnote numbers from the original text. Also, copy the footnotes. You will need to include them in your paper.)

Step 3. Take notes.

You need to record the information for your paper. Let’s say you want to do the research quickly and get right down to writing. The quickest way is to copy and paste what you want to quote into a word processor document.

This excerpt has a couple of ideas in it, so you’ll have to decide how you’ll use the information. The best strategy is to have some idea of how the paper will be structured before you begin taking notes. You can copy and paste your source notes into the informal outline. Although the passage is not two complete paragraphs, it does contain a paragraph break, and that seems the logical place to break up the information into two notes. When you use a source, you should use only one idea at a time, rather than quoting or paraphrasing huge blocks of text.

Here’s the area of your paper in which this note will best fit:

Growth of Internet Hate Speech

“Hate-based Web sites have grown dramatically in recent years. In 1995 at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, there was only on hate site¹ but today, the Simon Wiesenthal Center² and the Anti-Defamation League³ have documented about 2,800 hate sites. The Internet has put the problem of incendiary hate into sharp relief, raising many difficult political, legal and social questions” (Leets 287-288).

Here’s another area you’re covering in your paper, where this note will fit:

Concerns about Internet Hate Speech

“Consequently, the American debate regarding censorship of hate speech is moving from traditional forms to newer ones found on-line. In particular, the Internet has become a key organizing tool for hate groups.⁴ As scholars have noted, the Internet is a powerful forum of communication with its broad reach, interactivity and multi-media capability to disseminate information.⁵ The Web is providing an unprecedented vehicle for forging communities⁶ and making communication quicker, easier and cheaper. These features inevitably result in questions about impact, especially when viewed as empowering racists and other extremists” (Leets 288).

You have to add quotation marks to the passage; the computer doesn’t know you’re using a quote unless you tell it. You also must give the author’s last name and the page number (or paragraph number if there is no page number). In this case, you see the page number because the article was in the database in its full image form, exactly as it appeared in the original journal, with identical page numbers. In APA style, you’d also need the year the article was published.

At this point, you can leave the note in its raw form until you’re ready to put together your paper.

Step 4. Insert the source information.

Some professors will ask you to write a paper before even looking for sources to back it up. Others prefer that your essay spring from what you learn while researching. Either way, your paper should end up being your own synthesis of the information, not regurgitation.