Avoiding Plagiarism in Writing
Using a Direct Quote from the Web
Prepared by Mrs. Kieffer
Last Modified 4-23-2012
Sometimes when you are doing research for a paper, you find the exact words you would like to use in your paper. You can’t simply copy those words down and pass them off as your own. Stealing another author’s words is plagiarism. If you use the exact words of an author, you need to use quotation marks to set those words off.
For example: Erica is writing about iPods in her persuasive essay. She found the perfect words on the Apple website and would like to use them in her paper. She doesn’t want to plagiarize, so she uses a direct quote. Erica also notices there are no page numbers on the website page she is using. In her paper, she writes the following:
According to Apple, “The retina display on the new, third -generation iPad makes everything look crisper and more lifelike.”
If Erica was using a website with pages, and her quote was found on page 14, she would include the page number after the quotation marks and inside parentheses. There is no period inside the quotation mark. The period goes after the ending parenthesis.
According to Apple, “The retina display on the new, third-generation iPad makes everything look crisper and more lifelike” (14).
Last Modified 4-23-2012
Sometimes when you are doing research for a paper, you find the exact words you would like to use in your paper. You can’t simply copy those words down and pass them off as your own. Stealing another author’s words is plagiarism. If you use the exact words of an author, you need to use quotation marks to set those words off.
For example: Erica is writing about iPods in her persuasive essay. She found the perfect words on the Apple website and would like to use them in her paper. She doesn’t want to plagiarize, so she uses a direct quote. Erica also notices there are no page numbers on the website page she is using. In her paper, she writes the following:
According to Apple, “The retina display on the new, third -generation iPad makes everything look crisper and more lifelike.”
If Erica was using a website with pages, and her quote was found on page 14, she would include the page number after the quotation marks and inside parentheses. There is no period inside the quotation mark. The period goes after the ending parenthesis.
According to Apple, “The retina display on the new, third-generation iPad makes everything look crisper and more lifelike” (14).