So You Got Sued….
Almost all new college students come into college taking the same basic classes, which include English. Some may be more familiar with the tones of the English language while others are beginners, but they all go through the same course syllabus which includes source usage and citation. Source usage and citation is the action of taking information from a separate article, magazine, or source of information, using it in your writing, and correctly citing the article from which you got the information. When citing, you must include the author’s last name and the year the article was published. For example, whenever you are writing a piece, whether it’s an essay for your teacher or it’s something for your job, it’s almost always recommended that you include information from other sources.
That is the recommendation because it strengthens your position whatever it may be, or it presents the idea that you are well versed in your topic. Now that a need for sources has been established, the next step is to properly use it within your piece. There are well-known rules regarding the usage of information. Those rules are there to prevent plagiarism which is the misuse of information or the false claiming of information as your own. When using a source, you put the information in quotation marks and put in parentheses the author and what page you got the information from. The last thing to do is to properly cite a source. Citation is the act of giving credit to the author of the information that you borrowed. There are strict rules regarding the citation of information that can be found online. For example, we will cite an article about the famous Sigmund Freud. We want to put a quote about his death so we will use “The death of Sigmund Freud……marks the end of a revolutionary phase in the history of medicine” (Freud, 1). Ellipses were used the quote to indicate that there were extra words in the quote that was not useful to the objective we wanted to accomplish so we hid them with ellipses. Apart from that, when you insert a quote in a sentence, you always want to make sure that at the end of the sentence, you put the author of the article and the page on which you found the quote in parenthesis.
We have just finished an in-text citation, the citing of sources within your text so now the next thing is to prepare the citation for the bibliography. All sources will, more or less, follow this format of citation: Author’s Last name, First name. “Title of Source.” Title of Container, other contributors, version, numbers, publisher, publication date, location. Some sources may have all the requirements while others may not have all of them, but they will all follow that format. A key detail is that the title of the container, i.e. the publisher or journal, will always be italicized along with the title of the database from with you got your source. An example of the final citation is as follows: “Sigmund Freud.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 4108, 1939, pp. 693–693. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20314161. Accessed 9 Feb. 2020. Failure to properly cite a source can lead to accusations of plagiarism which is a very serious offense and if done in a public paper, the worst outcome is that you are sued and lose all credibility.
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy. New York: Spiegel and Grau,2014.
“Sigmund Freud.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 4108, 1939, pp. 693–693. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20314161. Accessed 9 Feb. 2020.