Blog Post #8

Chapter Seven of the Bedford Book of Genres is an invaluable resource for completing ENC 2135, and many other classes at Florida State University. Chapter Seven covers plagiarism, something that had only lightly been touched on during my high school and state college experiences. Previously, plagiarism was this grey area of academic writing that just meant you couldn’t copy and paste from the internet and use it as your own. For example, in many of my previous classes, paraphrasing without citations was not considered such a violation as I see it to be now. Chapter Seven not only reviews the correct ways to paraphrase with explicit detail, it also analyzes summarizing a source, and using quotations from a specific source. Being able to correctly cite a source is imperative for allowing an author to directly use that source in an article. Using outside sources are so important in literature to help boost the credibility of an author and to provide supporting evidence to back an author’s opinion. Chapter Seven also touches on citations within more complex writing formats such as multigenre and multimodal articles. Chapter Seven not only explains how to cite sources, but it explains how to cite sources in an easier and more refined way than most sources do. Without the knowledge of how to correctly use citations, plagiarism can turn what should be an outstanding essay into a one-way ticket to expulsion