What's wrong with just copying and pasting from my sources into my assignment? Isn't that what everyone does?
Documenting sources will help you avoid plagiarizing someone else's work.
Plagiarizing can have serious consequences for college students. They can failing assignments or classes and even getting kicked out of school.
Students can avoid plagiarism by submitting original work and by properly documenting their sources of information. There are three key steps to documenting (citing) sources:
Knowing how long or how in-depth a project is can help you find a topic that works for you. Click on the Project Plan Worksheet beside the document icon below and fill it out. You can print or save the worksheet to use as a guide.
Use the resources on this page and your class textbooks to create a bibliography of the sources you have collected so far for your project. A bibliography is just a list of the sources that you use in a project: books, articles, websites, interviews, etc. Each source is called a citation.
A bibliography is usually formatted in MLA, APA, or Chicago style. This means that there will be rules about what information to list and how to list it. Check with your professor to see which style to use.
