Acknowledging Your Sources Accurately and Appropriately

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While artists, lawyers, and institutions like the film and music industries sort out fair use laws, the bottom line in your academic work is clear: document sources accurately and fully and do not be careless about this very important procedure.

Here, for example, is the first paragraph from a print essay by Russell Platt published in the Nation:

Classical music in America, we are frequently told, is in its death throes: its orchestras bled dry by expensive guest soloists and greedy musicians’ unions, its media presence shrinking, its prestige diminished, its educational role ignored, its big record labels dying out or merging into faceless corporate entities. We seem to have too many well-trained musicians in need of work, too many good composers going without commissions, too many concerts to offer an already satiated public.

— Russell Platt, “New World Symphony”

To cite this passage correctly in MLA documentation style, you could quote directly from it, using both quotation marks and some form of note identifying the author or source. Either of the following versions would be acceptable:

Russell Platt has doubts about claims that classical music is “in its death throes: its orchestras bled dry by expensive guest soloists and greedy musicians unions” (“New World”).

But is classical music in the United States really “in its death throes,” as some critics of the music scene suggest (Platt)?

You might also paraphrase Platt’s paragraph, putting his ideas entirely in your own words but still giving him due credit by ending your remarks with a simple in-text note:

A familiar story told by critics is that classical music faces a bleak future in the United States, with grasping soloists and unions bankrupting orchestras and classical works vanishing from radio and television, school curricula, and the labels of recording conglomerates. The public may not be willing to support all the talented musicians and composers we have today (Platt).

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All of these sentences with citations would be keyed to a works cited entry at the end of the paper that would look like the following in MLA style:

Platt, Russell. “New World Symphony.” The Nation, 3 Oct. 2005, www.thenation.com/article/new-world-symphony/.

How might a citation go wrong? As we indicated, omitting either the quotation marks around a borrowed passage or an acknowledgment of the source is grounds for complaint. Neither of the following sentences provides enough information for a correct citation:

But is classical music in the United States really in its death throes, as some critics of the music scene suggest, with its prestige diminished, its educational role ignored, and its big record labels dying (Platt)?

But is classical music in the United States really in “its death throes,” as some critics of the music scene suggest, with “its prestige diminished, its educational role ignored, [and] its big record labels dying”?

Just as faulty is a paraphrase such as the following, which borrows the words or ideas of the source too closely. It represents plagiarism, despite the fact that it identifies the source from which almost all the ideas — and a good many words — are borrowed:

In “New World Symphony,” Russell Platt observes that classical music is thought by many to be in bad shape in America. Its orchestras are being sucked dry by costly guest artists and insatiable unionized musicians, while its place on TV and radio is shrinking. The problem may be that we have too many well-trained musicians who need employment, too many good composers going without jobs, too many concerts for a public that prefers The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Even the fresh idea not taken from Platt at the end of the paragraph doesn’t alter the fact that the paraphrase is mostly a mix of Platt’s original words, lightly stirred.