Researched Writing: Integrating Sources
Michael Bertsch
You do it first as a service to the reader. The reader's reading your piece, and she goes, "Oh, this is really interesting. I want to know more." Then the person can go to your bibliography and find where that information came from, and thereby edify herself. Then I say, the second reason you footnote or substantiate your writing is to lend legitimacy and support to it, so that people believe you. If just John Smith walked off the street and said, "I've got a theory of evolution," it wouldn't work unless there's research behind it. I studied these finches and these beaks are really interesting, and here's these two iguanas, you gotta have something behind your paper to let people believe. The third reason is, if you steal somebody else's writing and don't credit, you're going to fail my class and you're going to get kicked out of the school and I get paid the same whether you do or don't. So it's your choice.

John Lovas
So it's not just a matter of having your opinions and putting them down, it's being certain that you've credited your sources for their own opinions and you've represented them fairly. And then construct your argument in relation to that. If you don't represent the other ideas fairly, you're making the whole thing up. You're not only making up your opinion, you're making up your opponent's opinion, or the person you're disagreeing with. And that's not the tradition of academic writing.

Cynthia Selfe
There are tasks in the real world, outside the classroom and inside the classroom that require you to write from sources. That is, to use the experiences you get in your everyday life or to use the experiences you bring from work or the experiences that you gather through your church or your family or your home life and to take those experiences and to weave them into the text of your writing. And also to acknowledge when the ideas that you weave into the text of your writing come from somebody else, and come from a different source, and should be acknowledged as the intellectual work of others.

David Ellefson
I would look at the way someone else had presented it and I would look, okay how can I take this idea because their presentation obviously is really good. I want to present this idea, how can I do it in my own way? And that I think was really the important thing was to personalize it, and so that I could walk away for my computer feeling good that I don't have to look over my shoulder like, boy I sure hope so-and-so never reads my book to see that I stole something from them, you know. I've never… I didn't want to ever have that feeling, so I think it was a matter of working on it to where that sort of looking over my shoulder went away and got it to that point.