Essential Terms

Communication that takes a stance on a subject and attempts to persuade the audience of that stance through reasons and evidence

Mechanisms for documenting outside sources referenced in your essay, and ensure they receive credit for their words and ideas

A list of aspects to examine to help you determine the credibility and relevance of an outside source: currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, purpose

A grammatical structure that contains a subject and a verb but cannot exist on its own because it does not express a complete thought

A group of people who share mutual interests and beliefs

Grammatical structures that can exist on their own because they have a subject and a predicate

When a writer uses the words and ideas of someone else and passes them off as his or her own

Emphasizes writing as a process, with three steps: prewriting, writing, and revising

Borrowing the exact wording used in a source and denoted by quotation marks and citations