Plagiarism

A direct quotation is when you have quotation marks around a portion of someone else's work that is identical to the original. You would use a direct quotation when summarizing or paraphrasing the work will not be sufficient or when you want to keep the authors unique wording.

Notes:

• You don't want to have too many direct quotations in your work. Try to limit your direct quotations to only the most important.
• Use appropriate transitions so that your writing flows smoothly between the quote and your writing. 
• Be careful not to change the authors meaning. 

A summary is when you use your own words to paint a broad picture of the main ideas of another person's work. Summarizing is good for providing background information. 

Paraphrasing is very similar to summarizing in that you use your own words to explain a topic. However, paraphrasing deals more with details than main ideas. 

Both summarizing and paraphrasing require you to use your own words and structure the language in your own way. The Purdue OWL has a great exercise where they suggest that you: 

• Read an entire article, recording the main idea and key points.
• Summarize the main idea.
• Paraphrase the key points.
• Find words, phrases, or brief passages that could be quoted directly. 

This practice could help build your skills in properly using sources in the future. 

Common knowledge is content that: 

• can be found in many different places (3-5 different sources) 
• is generally accepted as true

One misconception is that common knowledge is known by everyone. For instance, you might not know who is the current president of Mexico, but that information can be easily determined from many different sources making it common knowledge. However, if you are ever in doubt, find a source and cite it!