Attributive Tags/Summarizing/Paraphrasing/Plagiarism Guidelines

English 101

Attributive Tags/Summarizing/Paraphrasing/Plagiarism Guidelines

Attributive Tags

Attributive tags are short phrases that help you indicate that an idea in your writing comes from somewhere else. In other words, you "tag" ideas and other evidence to show that they should be attributed to outside sources. Attributive tags have some key benefits:

·  They help you avoid being accused of plagiarism, since they ensure that you clearly indicate all paraphrased, summarized, and quoted material.

·  They help your reader understand when outside evidence starts and stops.

·  They help you establish the authority of your evidence, since they give you an opportunity to establish the credentials of your source.

Quotations which have been "dropped into" a paragraph with no in-text attribution are sometimes referred to as "orphan quotes," since they can often feel misplaced and unclearly related to the material around them. In general, avoid orphan quotes in your writing!

Choosing the Right Attributive Tag

You can use lots of verbs in your attributive tags, so choose one that works appropriately for your writing:

·  Neutral tags: see list online or handout

·  Tags to suggest that an idea may not be fully accepted: contends, suggests, asserts, proposes, speculates

·  Tags that allow you to emphasize a source's key ideas: points out, emphasizes

·  Tags for adding information to an idea you're establishing: adds, agrees, confirms

·  Tags to introduce counter-arguments or alternate views: argues, disagrees, warns, contends

·  Tags related to future actions/solutions: proposes, predicts, speculates

Example

Below is an example of an "orphan quote," where evidence is dropped into a paragraph without the use of the proper attributive tag.

Many adults today believe that teenagers are uninterested in social activism. However, upon closer inspection, making a public statement has merely taking new forms. "Sixty percent of the 28,692 fans of the ‘Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus' Facebook page were between the ages of 13 and 18" (Johnson 268). Adults born before 1970 may think social activism still requires sit-ins and protests, but today's teens are finding different ways to support and create change.

Here is a revised version, with the quote properly integrated:

Many adults today believe that teenagers are uninterested in social activism. However, upon closer inspection, making a public statements has merely taking new forms. Technology, especially, provides a way for teens to participate in meaningful social change. For example, Bret Johnson, director of SPPNTO (Society for the Preservation of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus), points out that teens are huge supporters of current awareness campaigns; he notes that "sixty percent of the 28,692 fans of the ‘Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus' Facebook page [are] between the ages of 13 and 18" (268). Adults born before 1970 may think social activism still requires sit-ins and protests, but today's teens are finding different ways to support and create change.

Attributive Tags / aka Signal Phrases

Your success in academic writing may depend on how well you integrate outside sources into your essays. To make your points effectively and to build credibility, you must show your audience how your source material supports your points and forwards your argument. To smoothly incorporate source material, use signal phrases also called attributive tags. These phrases signal that you are borrowing outside information and indicate the source of that material. A signal phrase or attributive tag can also build ethos by identifying the academic affiliation or asserting the professional credentials of your source. Good tags will clarify for the audience where more information about the subject can be found, and reinforce that you, not the sources, are in charge of the paper.

Your first attributive tag about a source is likely to be longer than subsequent ones:

Dr. Redford Williams, director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Duke University asserts that "diet and exercise alone are like a two-legged stool" (92). He explains that the third leg, stress management, must also be an active undertaking to reduce the risks of heart attacks.

According to Williams the stress management techniques reduce recurrence of…

Williams argues that chances of improvement over five years…

In some instances, an author's name and credentials might not be as informative as the place where an article was published:

In an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Jussi Vahtera concludes that stress increases vulnerability to cardiac trouble (78).

The absence of the attributive tags or signal phrase in an essay frequently reveals a passive patchwork way of writing papers with quotes dropped in and abandoned without explanation and connection to the argument.

Without tags, the audience may become confused about the source of the information. For example:

Confusion Caused by Lack of Attributive Tag: Romance readers insist on predictable plots of "childlike restrictions and simplicity," and as a result these books lack "moral ambiguity" (Gray 76).

Sentence Revised with Attributive Tag: In "Readers Reduced" Gary Gray explains that romance readers insist on predictable plots of "childlike restrictions and simplicity" which result in plots which lack "moral ambiguity" (76).

As the first sentence begins, the audience has every reason to think that it states the essay writer's ideas. Matters become confusing when the quotation marks signal that another voice has entered the text, but its source and the author's name in the citation is not particularly informative. Readers would have to go to the works cited list to get the contextualizing information that the second sentence provides.

Attributive tags can appear at any natural break within a sentence. Here are some examples of attributive tags:

Published in 1997 in the online journal Slate, Gary Gray's article "Readers Reduced" offers…

Gray challenges readers to….

The purpose of reading, Gray contends, is to stimulate thinking and the imagination…

Predictable plots, so Gray's argument goes, offer escape rather than …

Attributive tags can offer a variety of information depending upon a writer's purpose and sense of the intended audience's background knowledge on the subject. Possible elements, which can be used alone or in combination, include

·  author's name

·  Title of the article

·  Publication information

·  Author's or expert's credentials or relevant specialty ("Director of Research at Duke University," "a high school teacher," "a lawyer who has defended serial killers in the past," "the Justice Department's main espionage prosecutor for over 20 years,." …)

·  A quick statement of the work's purpose or reputation "an article detailing the study's results," "King's well-known speech at the 1963 march on Washington," "a brochure explaining the hospital's purpose," "the President's State of the Union Address," …

·  An indication of the work's context and the conversation it is a part of (Birk's essay praising books" or "a scathing litter to the editor published in the Corpus Christi Caller Times

Of course if you used all this information in one tag, the sentence would have hardly any room left for you own ideas. You must decide what kind of information and how much your readers need at a given point in a text.

The following guidelines will help you use attributive tags effectively.

·  Make the tag part of your own sentence.

·  The first time you bring in a particular source, put the tag before the quotation or summary so that readers will have the background they need when they reach the borrowed source material.

·  Vary the format and vocabulary of your tags. Avoid a long string of phrases that repeat "according to" or "he says."

·  Provide just enough background to help readers understand the significance of the material you are bringing in, not everything there is to say about the source

·  base your decision about attributive tags on what you are confident readers will recognize and what will help them recognize the relevance of the source you are using.

Avoiding Plagiarism

by Dr. Michael O'Conner

Plagiarism is cheating. Deliberate plagiarism is copying the work of others and turning it as your own. Think of it as stealing the intellectual property of others, who put in plenty of hard work to create that property, so that you don't have to do as much academic work.

There is, however, another kind of plagiarism--accidental or unintentional plagiarism. This happens when a writer does not intend to plagiarize, but fails to cite his or her sources completely and correctly or copies too much of a source's phrasing or structures when attempts are made to paraphrase or summarize material. Careful notetaking and a clear understanding of the rules for quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing sources can help prevent unintentional plagiarism.

We need to understand very clearly these three approaches to using outside sources:

·  Quoting is when you copy a source word for word, exactly as it appears in a text, and place those words in quotation marks.

·  Paraphrasing restates the information from a source, using your own words.

·  Summarizing includes briefly restating only the main ideas of a source, using your own words.

Muriel Harris notes that paraphrases have about the same number of words as the original sources but they must be in your own words. They omit your own opinions or ideas on the subject (242). One way to help avoid plagiarism within paraphrases is to use plenty of attributive tags, introductory phrases which identifying the author or speaker, such as, "According to American author Mark Twain, . . ."

Harris explains that summaries should include only main ideas, omitting all details and specifics, and are as objective as possible, excluding your own interpretations or slant on the material being summarized (241).

The real key to successfully avoiding plagiarism is to let the reader know when your words and ideas stop and when the outside expert's ideas and words begin, and vice-versa. As Harris states:

To avoid plagiarism, read over your paper and ask yourself whether your readers can properly identify which ideas and words are yours and which are from the sources you cite. If that is clear, if you have not let your paper become merely a string of quotations from sources, and if the paper predominantly reflects your words, phrases, and integration of ideas, then you are not plagiarizing (250).

The Blair Handbook recommends the following steps to avoid plagiarism:

·  Place all quoted passages in quotation marks and provide source information, even if it is only one phrase.

·  Identify the source from which you have paraphrased or summarized ideas, just as you do when you quote directly.

·  Give credit for any creative ideas you borrow from an original source. For example, if you use an author's anecdote to illustrate a point, acknowledge it.

·  Replace unimportant language with your own, and use different sentence structures when you paraphrase or summarize.

·  Acknowledge the source if you borrow any organizational structures or headings from an author. Don't use the same subtopics, for example.

·  Put any words or phrases you borrow in quotation marks, especially an author's unique way of saying something.

Take a look at this original text from Carol Lea Clark's A Student's Guide to the Internet:

The World Wide Web makes global publishing possible for anyone who is able to arrange disk space on a server and has some basic knowledge of how pages are created.

Is the following an acceptable paraphrase?

World-wide publishing is possible for anyone who has access to server disk-space and who has knowledge of how Web pages are made (Clark 77).

The answer is no: even though the paraphrase is cited properly, too much of both the original wording and too much of the structure of the original sentence remain. This sentence is plagiarized.

When using secondary sources in your essays, professors generally prefer a mixture of direct quotations, paraphrases and summary. However, borrowing too closely from the authority or expert when you paraphrase or summarize is still considered plagiarism.

Diane Hacker, in the Bedford Handbook states:

"When you summarize or paraphrase, it is not enough to name the source; you must restate the source's meaning using your own language. You are guilty of plagiarism if you half-copy the author's sentences--either by mixing the author's well-chosen phrases without using quotation marks or by plugging your own synonyms into the author's sentence structure" (572).

Hacker emphasizes that you should limit your use of direct quotations.

She recommends that student writers mostly summarize or paraphrase:

·  when using outside sources and authorities.

Generally, Hacker says only use direct quotations:

·  when language is especially vivid or expressive

·  when exact wording is needed for technical accuracy

·  when it is important to let the debaters of an issues explain their positions in their own words (575)

Works Cited

Fulwiler, Toby and Alan R. Hayakawa. The Blair Handbook, Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Blair

Press, 1997.

Hacker, Diana. The Bedford Handbook, Fifth Edition. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

Harris, Muriel. Prentice Hall Reference Guide to Grammar and Usage. Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Blair Press, 1997.

Compiled from:

faculty.millikin.edu/~moconner/writing/plagiarism1.html

www.uwyo.edu/english/undergraduate-students/english1010/1010-osh-attributive%20tags.html

dmc122011.delmar.edu/engl/instruct/scrowson/signalphrases.html