ENG: Overview

• Give yourself enough time to engage the process.
• Work broad to narrow.  Gain an overview of your topic before you delve deep.
• Ask yourself who might "have" the information you need?
• Always "be researching"  -- Look carefully at what your sources are telling you; use them to guide your research.
• The Librarians are here to help you! Use them as a resource!

Advice

There are three main ways to integrate another person's work into your own.  As you write, it is important to use each method to make your writing interesting and readable. 

The three methods are:

• Quoting - Direct quotations means that you use the exact words employed by the authors in the original text.  Usually, you will only use a few phrases or a sentence or two.
   

• Paraphrasing -- To paraphrase something means to put the source material into your own words.  Typically, the paraphrase will be shorter than the source material. 
   

• Summarizing -- When you need to use long passages, chapters, etc. of source material, you can rewrite the main ideas in much shorter form.  However, the ideas belong to the source material so they still need to be cited.

Learning Modules

• Video: Synthesizing Information
  covers quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing
   
• Tutorial: Synthesizing Information 
  helps you explore in more detail quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing
   
• Video: Anatomy of a Research Paper
  covers how to structure your paper


• Incorporating Sources into your writing
  From Roane State Community College Writing Center. This website offers some good tips on how to use signal phrases and actually construct sentences with sources.