Unit 5: Writing the Research Paper and Acknowledging Your Sources
When you write a research paper, your work's success can depend almost as heavily on the work of others as it does on your own efforts. Your information sources not only provide essential facts and insights that can enhance and clarify your original ideas, but source material can also help you better understand your own theories and opinions and help you to arrive at more authoritative, clearly-drawn conclusions.
Because of the debt that you, as the author of a research paper, owe your sources, you must understand how to present, acknowledge, and document the sources you have built into your work. You should be aware that using accepted standards of style and citation can benefit you as a writer. When your references are clearly annotated within your work, you can see where your source material appears, making it that much easier to edit, update, and expand your work.
By following accepted standards to present your work in a manner accessible to readers, you also enhance your credibility as a writer and researcher. When your readers can easily identify and check your sources, they are more likely to accept you as a member of their discourse communities. This is especially important in an academic environment, where your readers are likely to investigate your work as a potential source for their own research projects. To put it bluntly, careful adherence to accepted style conventions in academic writing can mean the difference between great success and total failure.
In this unit, we will review the concept of plagiarism and discuss how you can use clear, consistent documentation to avoid even the unintentional misuse of source material. We will also review many of the commonly accepted methods of acknowledging and documenting sources used in writing college research papers. We will pay particular attention to the Modern Language Association (MLA) style standards because this is the most widely used convention in college undergraduate work.
This unit will culminate in an opportunity to build your selected source material into a fully developed first draft of your final research paper. By the time you have finished the final activity in this unit, you should have accomplished much of the groundwork for your final research paper.
By the time you have finished the work in this unit, you should have a command of the materials and techniques you will need to complete a well-developed academic paper. As a by-product, your final research paper for this course will probably be nearly finished.
This unit's final activity is to develop a final polished and clearly documented research paper that makes full use of the tools, techniques, and products that you have discovered, developed, and organized during the preceding four units.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 27 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- explain the importance of accurately and honestly crediting information sources;
- define plagiarism, and explain how to avoid it;
- describe the advantages of accurate and complete citation to all members of the discourse community (i.e., readers, source authors, and the writer);
- identify and use the most common standards for citing sources in academic writing; and
- develop a draft of an academic research paper.
5.1: Preparing to Write the First Draft.
5.1.1: Drafting Process
Read this section and complete the exercises. Developing a first draft of a paper requires a series of steps. This section takes you through the steps and the order in which they should be completed so that you may write a strong first draft.
5.1.2: Overcoming Writer's Block
5.2: Getting Started
5.2.1: Writing an Introduction
Read this handout to learn about the purpose of writing a strong introduction as well as tips and strategies to effectively open your paper. Using the information you have learned in this reading, revise the introduction you drafted in subunit 5.1.1 based on Exercise 1 in this article.
5.2.2: Paragraph Development
Read this article on paragraphs. Pay close attention to the section on the five-step process to writing a paragraph, and copy each step into your notebook. Do the paragraph troubleshooting exercises to understand what makes a paragraph a good paragraph.
5.2.3: Writing a Conclusion
Read this section and complete Exercise 3, which gives a review of writing effective introductions and conclusions.
5.3: Citing Sources
5.3.1: Why You Must Acknowledge Sources
Read this chapter to learn about avoiding plagiarism. Do not attempt the exercise right now; you will work on it later in this unit.
5.3.2: Acknowledging and Integrating Sources
Read this section and complete the exercises, which will help you properly cite sources in your research paper.
5.3.3: Avoiding Plagiarism
Read this article. Plagiarism, both intentional and unintentional, can be a major problem in academic writing.
5.3.3.1: Documenting to Avoid Plagiarism
Read this page and note the accepted techniques for citing source information.
5.3.3.2: When Sources Must Be Cited
Review this checklist carefully and note the accepted techniques for citing source information.
5.3.4: Frequently Asked Questions about Citing Sources
Read these frequently asked questions about citing sources carefully and note the accepted techniques for citing source information.
5.4: Standard Style and Documentation Systems
There are several widely used style standards. Each of these is preferred in a different set of disciplines. Unless you are taking this course to prepare a research paper for another course that requires a different style standard, you should use MLA style to prepare your research paper for this course.
5.4.1: Modern Language Association (MLA) Style
Read this section and complete the exercises, which will help you properly cite sources in your research paper.
5.4.2: American Psychological Association (APA) Style
Read this section and complete the exercises, which walk you through the steps of APA formatting. Knowledge of APA style is not required for this course. You should review the material available through these pages so that you can get a general understanding about using APA style to document sources for reference papers in the sciences.
5.4.3: The Chicago Manual of Style
Knowledge of Chicago style is not required for this course. You should review the material available through these pages to understand using the Chicago style to document sources.
5.4.4: Comparing Documentation Styles
Select three sources that you investigated when you began researching your paper and format them in accordance with MLA bibliographic style. Then, reformat them in accordance with APA and Chicago style. In three short paragraphs, compare and contrast the resulting sets of entries.
5.4.5: Unit 5 Activity
Use the outline and research notes that you have compiled to develop the draft of a research paper of 1200 to 1500 words (approximately five double-spaced pages).
In Unit 6, after you have finalized your research and completed the full draft, you will have the opportunity to review and revise your work to make it as polished as you can.
Unit 5 Assessment
- Receive a grade
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.
- This assessment does not count towards your grade. It is just for practice!
- You will see the correct answers when you submit your answers. Use this to help you study for the final exam!
- You can take this assessment as many times as you want, whenever you want.