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