Academic Skills Essentials: Integrating others' ideas

When writing for academic purposes, you are usually required to support your contentions with evidence. Your responsibility as a student is to make it clear for your reader which ideas in your writing are your own, and which ones belong to other authors. Without a reference attached to an idea within your writing, the assumption is that it is your own idea. Not properly referencing ideas that are not your own can result in serious academic penalties at ECU.

How can this guide help me?

This guide shows you how to integrate others’ ideas effectively using an author-date referencing system like APA. Using APA, there are two main ways that you can signal to your reader that an idea in your writing is not your own:

• Quoting – where the exact words of the writer are used, the quote is enclosed within quotation marks, and the author, year of publication and page number is provided in text.
• Paraphrasing – which is the process of expressing someone else’s idea using your own words while retaining the original meaning. The author and year of publication is provided in text.

Whether you quote or paraphrase, you can use either an:

• Idea-prominent citation (where the idea comes first, and the author is not included as a part of the sentence)

e.g. Studying in an English speaking country seems to be one of the best methods of improving your English language (Farrelly, 1989)

OR

• Author-prominent citation (where the author comes first and forms the subject of the sentence before the idea is introduced)

e.g. Farrelly (1989) suggests that studying in an English speaking  country seems to be one of the best methods of improving your English language.

Rasmussen College. (2018). Library and learning services: Q. Can I use one citation at the end of a multiple sentence paragraph, or do I have to cite for every sentence? Retrieved from https://rasmussen.libanswers.com/friendly.php?slug=faq/32328

1. Examine the following two texts. Text A is written wholly using idea prominent citations, while Text B is written using author prominent. Which text reads better?

a. Text A
b. Text B

Legend

Student’s voice (topic sentence)

In text reference/citation

Reporting verb

Text A

Frogs are an excellent indicator species to measure wetland health. They are very sensitive to changes in pH caused by acid rain, and they are also very sensitive to different types of pollution (Willemssen, 2010). When frog populations in a wetland plummet, one can be sure that something is going wrong in the wetland (Willemssen, 2010). In addition, when oddities in frog morphology appear, such as frogs with five legs or two heads, one can also assume something is going wrong in the wetland environment (Willemssen, 2010).

Text B

Frogs are excellent indicator species to measure wetland health. Willemssen (2010) refers to research conducted recently in Wisconsin that shows that frogs are very sensitive to changes in pH caused by acid rain, and they are also very sensitive to different types of pollution. Her research indicates that when frog populations in a wetland plummet, one can be sure that something is going wrong in the wetland. In addition, she finishes by noting that when oddities in frog morphology appear, like frogs with five legs or two heads, one can also assume something is going wrong in the wetland environment.

Adapted from Rasmussen College (2018)