When you take notes and jot down ideas, use your own words as much as possible. Avoid copying passages—or cutting and pasting texts from electronic sources—without using quotation marks to indicate which words are yours and which ones you’ve taken from a source.

If you half-copy the author’s sentences—either by mixing the author’s phrases with your own without using quotation marks or by plugging your synonyms into the author’s sentence structure—you are committing plagiarism, a serious academic offense. This kind of plagiarism is sometimes referred to as patchwriting.

To take notes responsibly, make sure you understand the ideas in the source. What is the meaning of certain words? What is the argument being made? What is the evidence? Resist the temptation to look at the source as you take notes—except when you are quoting. Keep the source close by so that you can check for accuracy, but don’t try to put ideas in your own words with the source’s sentences in front of you. When you need to quote the exact words of a source, make sure you copy the words precisely and put quotation marks around them.

There are three kinds of note taking: summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. Be sure to include exact page references for all three types of notes, since you will need the page numbers later if you use the information in your paper. And it is good practice to indicate in your notes if you have summarized, paraphrased, or quoted an author’s words to avoid unintentionally plagiarizing a source.

Using sources responsibly: Be especially careful when using copy-and-paste functions in creating electronic files. Some researchers plagiarize their sources because they lose track of which words came from sources and which are their own. To prevent unintentional plagiarism, put quotation marks around any source text that you copy during your research.