Taking pride in citing sources

Why should researchers seek any opportunity to cite sources?

Citing sources is exciting and that is why: 

Students learn how to support their thoughts with materials from printed and digital sources.  

Often, teachers struggle to present citing sources in an exciting way. Students don't see strong reasons why they need to follow the rules. Many people believe that if they paraphrase the excerpt and replace original words with synonyms and related phrases, the text becomes their own creation, and therefore, they don't need to use the meticulous mechanics of an MLA format. 

I encourage students to provide sources of the materials in several ways:

I teach them to present their work as a serious investigation. When they show what kind of resources they use for their research, readers take their work in a considered manner. Perusers can check if the sources are reliable, and, therefore, accept that a valid backing supports the authors’ claims.  

By giving credits to creators of information students demonstrate their intelligence or erudition. Students present themselves as avid readers and information literate researchers. They know how to paraphrase and summarize main ideas, and follow the rules of social behavior. 

By acknowledging the works of others and building their own ideas on the previous knowledge, students demonstrate self-confidence. According to psychologists, some people plagiarize because they underestimate their creativity and consider the words of others as a better way of expressing the idea. These researchers forget to refer to the source and are caught plagiarizing.

Another important point is that a citation is analogous to an address and like an address should be written in a special format. If any of the constituents is missing, a letter won't find its addressee.

MLA Formatting and Style Guide by Purdue University, EasyBib website, and Noodle Tools are sources that we use to create the MLA format.

It requires the author's name, a title, publisher, a date when the work was created, and a format in which information is presented. Credits go to authors or the publisher of the material. 

Students learn that identifying the author is very important. It's the first step in recognizing the source as credible. If students provide only a URL (the Universal Resource Locator), it's an incomplete citation. By the way, as you may know, the most recent version of MLA doesn't require URL at all. 

Showing some examples of how professionals intentionally or unintentionally infringe the law of citations is yet another way to encourage students to cite sources. Students learn what consequences scientists, journalists, politicians, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers, educators and even weather forecasts face when are caught of using words and images of others and presenting them as their own.

Use every opportunity to cite sources!
Go, intellectuals!