Blog #6 - "integrating and documenting sources"

In high school, I always just threw in a quote from an article here or there when it could be semi-related to what I was writing about. Chapter 7 of the “Bedford Book of Genres” helped me with how to actually make sources apart of my writing and to even support my writing. I liked how the first part of this chapter was broken down into three different categories on “integrating a source into writings” and then continued to break these topics down individually. This chapter hit the whys, whats, and hows of integrating sources by quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing. Like always, the visuals helped me accurately picture what to do and how to do it. The second half of the chapter focused on avoiding plagiarism, which touched on paraphrasing properly and accurately citing used sources. Chapter 7 went through how to source every possible source you could thing of in MLA and APA style. I noticed a lot of the differences between these citation styles were in the order of how information was presented in a specific citation. Chapter 7 also touched on in-text citations, which was very helpful as I always found these a little difficult to grasp. I would always learn the in-text citations as I had to use them, then forget how to use them by the next time I needed to use the citations. The APA style was especially interesting to me because I have only ever used MLA before. Mat gives us flexibility with how we can site our sources, so I might experiment with an APA works cited page to see how I like it.