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Chapter 14
How Do I Use My Source Material?
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
G. K. C
HESTERTON
Your purpose in any research paper is to use other people's words and ideas to support your thesis. Since you're not an authority on the subject you're writing about, you must rely on recognized experts to help you make your point. How can you smoothly blend source material with your own words? Follow the steps described in this chapter.
Use Cue Words and Phrases
How can you show that the material you are quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing comes from outside sources and isn't something you made up? It's not enough just to plop the material into your paper, even if you surround exact quotes with quotation marks.
In addition to the awkwardness this creates, you're sacrificing most of the "punch" carried by expert opinions by not smoothly blending their words with yours. The reason for using outside sources is to buttress your claims, but if

 

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you're not going to give the experts clear credit in your research paper, you are in effect wasting their words.
Start by using cue words and phrases to set off outside material. As you blend the experts' words, be sure to include:
• The source of the material.
• The author's name.
• The author's identity, why this person is important. (This tells your readers why they should believe the person you cite.)
• The author's credentials, since they lend weight to the material.
Examples:
In Shakespeare, the Comedies, the noted literary critic Kenneth Muir claims that ...
In a March 15, 1999 front-page article in The New York Times, the well-known consumer activist Ralph Nader stated that ...
Testifying before Congress in 1985, prominent attorney F. Lee Bailey maintained that ...
Use the specific verb you need to indicate your exact shade of meaning. Here is a selection of verbs to choose from:
Verbs That Help You Integrate Quotations
adds
agrees
argues
concedes
acknowledges
admits
advises
confirms
asks
asserts
believes
concludes
claims
comments
compares
considers
contends
declares
defends
denies
disagrees
disputes
emphasizes
explain
endorses
grants
hints
hopes
finds
holds
illustrates
implies
insists
maintains
notes
observes
points out
rejects
relates
reports
responds
reveals
says
sees
speculates
shows
speculates
states
suggests
thinks
warns
writes

 

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Document the Material
As you include the outside source, be sure to provide enough information for your readers to clearly understand where it comes from. In most cases, this is done through parenthetical documentation, footnotes, or endnotes. These are explained fully in Chapters 15 and 16.
Use the Material to Make Your Point
Never assume that your readers understand why you included information. You may appear to be simply padding your paper with lots of outside sources. To avoid this misunderstanding and to strengthen your point, clarify your message and focus on your argument. You can do this at the beginning or end of a passage.
Example:
Cue words
Feminist Gloria Steinem argues that "Employers adhere to a number of beliefs about women that serve to reinforce a pattern of non-employment and non-participation for female employees"
Parenthetical documentation
[Steinem 54]. Since many employers feel that women work for extra money, women's jobs are non-essential. This leads to the conclusion that men should
Your point
be hired or promoted rather than women.

Showing That Material Has Been Cut
What happens if a quotations contains material that's irrelevant to your point? You can use an ellipsis (three evenly spaced periods) to show that you have omitted part of a quotation.
You can use ellipses in the middle of a quotation or at the end. Do not use an ellipsis at the beginning of a sentence; just start with the material you wish to quote. If you omit more

 

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than one sentence, add a period before the ellipsis, to show that the omission occurred at the end of a sentence.
Example:
Readers of the Atlantic Monthly were astonished to find in the January 1875 issue the debut of one ''Mark Twain.'' The originality of Twain's voice dazzled readers as the Atlantic showcased what was to become one of the great passages in American literature: "[Hannibal] the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning" is shocked into life by the cry of "S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin'!" As the Twain critic Justin Kaplan notes, "The gaudy packet ... was Mark Twain's reasserting his arrival and declaring once and for all that his surge of power and spectacle derived not from such streams as the meandering Charles or the sweet Thames but from 'the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.'"
Warning!
Never omit material from a quotation to change its meaning deliberately. This is a sleazy way of slanting a quotation to make it say what you mean. In addition, always be sure that the quotation makes grammatical sense after you have cut it.
Who Gets Credit?
Sometimes you have an idea about your topic but find after researching that you weren't the first person to come up with this idea. To take credit for your original thinking but give credit to others who came up with the idea first, present both versions of the idea and give credit to the outside source. If necessary, explain how your idea is different from the reference you used.
Example:
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Your idea
stand in line and buy blocks of tickets. To overcome this problem, at least one-third of the tickets offered for sale should be set aside for bona fide students.

Setting Off Long Quotations
As mentioned earlier, try to avoid using long quotations in your research paper. But if you must quote more than four typed lines of text, follow these guidelines:
• Indent the quotation one inch from the left margin.
• Do not indent the right margin.
• Do not single-space the quotation; stay with double-spacing.
• Do not enclose the quotation in quotation marks; since it is offset, it is understood to be quoted.
As always, introduce the quotation with a sentence and cue words, usually followed by a colon (:).
Example:
In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig extends Twain's idea. As Pirsig explains:
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When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytical knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts—something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as a kind of death—birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is [231–232].

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