In some ways, there really is nothing new under the sun, in writing and research as well as in life. Whatever writing you do has been influenced by what you have already read and experienced. As you work on your research project, you will be joining a scholarly conversation and responding to the work of others. Thus you will need to know how to use, integrate, and acknowledge the work of others.

Integrating sources into your writing can be quite a challenge. In fact, as a beginning researcher, you might do what Professor Rebecca Howard calls “patchwriting”: that is, rather than integrate the sources smoothly and accurately, you patch together words, phrases, and even structures from sources into your own writing, sometimes without citation. The author of this textbook remembers doing just such “patchwriting” for a report in middle school on her hero, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Luckily, she had a teacher who sat patiently with her, showing her how to paraphrase and summarize and quote from the sources correctly and effectively. So it takes time and effort—and good instruction—to learn to integrate sources appropriately into your writing rather than patchwriting, which is sometimes considered plagiarism even if you didn’t mean to plagiarize.

All writers need to understand current definitions of plagiarism (which have changed over time and differ from culture to culture) as well as the concept of intellectual property—the works protected by copyright and other laws—so they can give credit where credit is due.