WRITING FROM SOURCES: USING SOURCES TO MAKE YOUR OWN IDEAS CONVINCING
The papers you write in college are intended to be serious works of scholarship. This means that instructors will expect you to support your own ideas with convincing evidence from reliable sources and to document those sources. (To learn more about documenting sources in MLA and APA style, see Chapter 24.) When you write a research project, you don’t simply glue together the facts, statistics, information, and quotations you find in sources. Like any other essay-length writing, a research project must have a thesis that your body paragraphs support with reasons and evidence. Although the information from outside sources is not your own, the interpretation you give it should be your own.
When you are writing a paper from sources, instructors will expect you to use information from sources whenever your topic demands more factual information than you can provide from your personal knowledge and experience. For example, use information from sources to:
- Make general comments more specific. For example, instead of writing that “the crime rate in Boston has decreased over the past few years,” specify the years over which the decrease has occurred, and use official police statistics to show the exact percentage of the decrease in each year.
- Provide specific examples to illustrate your main points. For example, if you are writing about why some online companies charge a restocking fee for returns made after thirty days, locate a business with such a policy and find out its rationale.
- Use sources to supply technical information. For example, if you are writing about a drug that lowers high blood pressure, gather information about its manufacturer, ingredients, effectiveness, cost, and side effects so that you can make informed, accurate comments.
- Support opinions with concrete evidence. To support the claim that more federal assistance is needed for public education, you might provide facts and statistics showing how much less federal assistance is provided now than was provided in earlier decades, or you could quote education experts to support your position.
- Provide historical information or context. If you are writing about space stations, for example, find out when the first one was established, what country launched it, and what it has been used for. These details add useful background information to your research project.
- Compare information about similar events or ideas with those you are discussing. For example, if you are writing about a president’s intervention in a labor strike, find out if other presidents have intervened in similar strikes. You can then point out similarities and differences.
Instructors will also expect you to synthesize, or make connections, among sources. When you synthesize information and ideas, you engage in a kind of conversation with your sources, making connections among ideas and information that reinforce or challenge each other to create new meaning of your own. Synthesis allows you to: (For more on synthesizing, see Working with Sources: Evaluating Your Notes and Synthesizing.)
- Explore different points of view. For example, in a paper about the consequences of divorce on children, you might use some sources that discuss the negative consequences and others that discuss the benefits.
- Review key ideas on a topic. For example, in a paper for an economics class explaining the reasons for increased income disparity in the past ten years, you might begin by reviewing the main reasons others have offered and respond to ideas you agree or disagree with.
- Understand your topic in depth. For example, synthesizing information and ideas from a variety of sources on global warming will help you see the issue from a variety of perspectives, leading you to think more deeply about the issue.