Topics
incorporating sources into your writing and avoiding plagiarism
Required reading
Homework due
Revision of Essay 2
In-class assessment
Quiz 4 - incorporating sources into your writing and avoiding plagiarism
Read the following text and the three examples of using the text in an essay. Which uses may be considered plagiarism, and why?
From page 233 of:
Grafton, A. (1999). The Footnote: A curious history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Historians' practice of citation and quotation have rarely lived up to their precepts; footnotes have never supported, and can never support, every statement of fact in a given work. No apparatus can prevent all mistakes or eliminate all disagreements. Wise historians know that their craft resembles Penelope's art of weaving: footnotes and text will come together again and again, in ever-changing combinations of patterns and colors. Stability is not to be reached. [12] Nonetheless, the culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources. And that is the only ground we have to trust them. [13]
Notes:
12. Cf. N. Z. Davis, "On the Lame," American Historical Review, 93 (1988), 572-603.
13. I agree strongly with the discussion of problems of historical knowledge offered by R. Chartier, "Zeit der Zweifel," Neue Rundshau, 105 (1994), 9-20 at 17-19. Cf. also A. B. Spitzer, Historical Truth and Lies about the Past (Chapel Hill and London, 1996).
Examples using the text:
Footnotes can't support every statement of fact. There will always be errors and disagreements. The best historians know that their stories of the past will be continually written and rewritten. But footnotes give us the only reason to trust what historians say (Grafton, 1999, p. 233).
Footnotes "have never supported, and can never support, every statement of fact in a given work." But, as Grafton argued (1999), the "culturally contingent and eminently fallible footnote offers the only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources" (p. 233).
No amount of footnotes can prevent all mistakes or eliminate all disagreements. But the footnote is the "only guarantee we have that statements about the past derive from identifiable sources" (Grafton, 1999, p. 233).
