Chapter 15 Summary

Chapter 15 discusses how to use your sources effectively. This is very important because your sources provide your paper with knowledge that you may not have known otherwise and when you don't use them properly they aren't as effective anymore and bring your paper down. Being able to use your sources and use them in a effective way is key to show your audience you know what you are talking about and then back it up. This chapter has three major chapter which breakdown how you can use your sources to accomplish your purpose,  how to integrate sources into your draft and how to document your source. To begin with, your sources to help you as writer accomplish your purpose. You can use your sources to help you introduce ideas, contrast ideas, provide evidence, define specific evidence, clarify, set a mood you want your audience to feel and provide an example.  The next step with this is how you introduce it into your paper. The book suggests that you use a quotation, paraphrase, summary, illustrations such as images or videos. Using this will help you accomplish your purpose. Another problem very many people have is how you integrate your sources into your draft. This can be tricky because you don't want your paper to seem choppy and "cut and pasty." Some ideas to make it sound more fluent is you should first identify your source, by doing this you will be able to tell if this source will fit into this part of your paper. This also helps reduce your risk of plagiarism. Another key thing to keep in mind is that you want to quote strategically. This means you don't want over half of your paper being in quotes you want to place quotes in that will benefit your paper. Another way to incorporate your sources is you can paraphrase the information where you restate the information you discovered from your said source. Lastly, you will need to document your sources. By doing this you are giving credit to where credit is deserved and you are providing where your information came from and making yourself reliable. As you do this you want to keep in mind what type of documentation system you are using, for this paper we will be using MLA format. Make sure you clearly distinguish between your own ideas and ideas of your sources. All of these are to help you make sure your paper is providing credit where credit is deserved and that you are given credit for your own ideas.