Mark the Boundaries When Writing Your Draft

It’s a requirement in most college essays to use outside sources in addition to your own ideas and analysis. So you can’t avoid plagiarism by never using anyone else’s ideas. Instead, you have to get good at showing your readers where the “boundaries” are between your ideas and other people’s ideas (Harris 160-164). When these boundaries break down you are in danger of plagiarizing, whether you mean to or not.

The boundaries you mark allow you to differentiate your ideas from the borrowed ideas in your essay. Since you don’t need to mark your own ideas, the boundaries will be marked around the ideas you get from elsewhere. The right way to mark the boundaries of the ideas you get from other sources varies a little depending on what exactly you’re taking from the sources.

The scenarios below show the different ways to mark boundaries. The following research source is used for each of the examples:

Smith, Jordan W., et al. “Attendance Trends Threaten Future Operations of America’s State Park Systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 116, no. 26, June 2019, pp. 12775-12780. doi:10.1073/pnas.1902314116.

Adapted from The Plagiarism Handbook by Robert A. Harris:

Scenario 1

You are explaining the ideas you got from a source but you are not using any of the exact words from the source.

This is the most common way you will use sources in your college essays and you have to show the boundaries around them even though you are explaining them in your own words. Getting into the habit of marking the boundaries of paraphrases and summaries will protect you from a lot of possible plagiarism. It can feel awkward at first, but it gets easier with practice.

The boundaries of paraphrases, summaries, or any time you explain someone else’s ideas in your own words have to be marked with a lead-in and an in-text citation.

It will look something like this:

Researchers specializing in recreation and tourism have found that the costs of maintaining national parks so that the health and safety of visitors is protected will likely increase by nearly 800% by 2050 if trends in attendance growth remain the same (Smith, et al. 12778). It is not clear if the government will increase funding enough to keep up with demand.

In the example above, the lead-in is “Researchers specializing in recreation and tourism have found” and the in-text citation is (Smith et al. 12778). Smith is the name of the first author, et al. is a latin phrase that shows that there were multiple authors, and 12778 is the page number where the paraphrased information was located in the research source. If you are using a source that was never published in print, only online, you may not have a page number. That’s okay. You will include only the information you do have in the in-text citation.

Scenario 2

You are copying a short phrase, a part of a sentence or 1-2 sentences word-for-word from a source because you want to let your reader see it exactly how the original writer said it.

The boundaries of the quoted text have to be marked by opening and closing quotation marks and an in-text citation.

It will look something like this:

Funding for park maintenance is vitally important not just to ensure that park visitors have a good experience but because it costs a lot to put infrastructure in place that will “minimize the environmental disturbance visitors can have on natural landscapes and cultural resources” that the parks were designed to protect (Smith et al. 12775).

In the example above, the sentence contains the student’s own words as well as a quote from the research source. The quotation mark before the word “minimize shows that that’s where the exact words from the research source start. The quotation mark after resources” shows that that is where the exact words from the research source end. The in-text citation is (Smith et al. 12775).

Scenario 3

You are copying more than 4 lines word-for-word from a source because there is a long section of it that you want to let your reader see exactly how the writer said it in the original. Note: This is not common in college essays since you should usually explain ideas from other sources in your own words, but if you are analyzing a passage from a story, for example, you may need to show your reader a big chunk of it so that they know what you are analyzing.

The boundaries of the quoted text have to be marked by a lead-in, block indentation of the whole quote, and an in-text citation. Notice that this way of marking a quote is different because it’s a long passage. You don’t use quotation marks for quoting long passages in your essay.

It will look something like this:

Tourism researchers are concerned about the effect that growing attendance will have on national and state parks,

Visitation to parks and protected areas across the United States has increased substantially over the past half-century; despite slight declines in the 1990s and early 2000s, many parks are now experiencing record high visitation. This has led to many well-publicized claims that the nation’s national and state parks are being “loved to death.” Annual visits to the nation’s national parks, for example, increased by 33% from 1984 to 2017. (Smith et al. 12775)

National parks may need to have more restrictions on how many people can use them at a time, but that has to be balanced with the need to make sure all people have equitable access to the parks.

In the example above, the lead-in is the sentence that starts Tourism researchers are concerned… The whole indented section is the quote from the research source. It doesn't have quotation marks around it, but your reader will know it's a quote because it is indented. After the indented section is the student’s own conclusion, related to the quote from the research source. The in-text citation is (Smith et al. 12775), which doesn’t have a period after it because the rules for citing a long passage in the text are different from the rules for normal quotes.

Scenario 4

There is another boundary that you may need to mark in your writing: the boundary between the research source you are using and a source they are citing. In this case, you are quoting or paraphrasing information that the research source you’re using got from somewhere else.

Citation rules usually say that you should seek out the first origin of any idea that you want to use in your essay instead of relying on what the research source you have says about it. But often you will not have access to the original source of the idea, so you have to show in your essay that you know who the original source is even though you didn’t get to read it yourself. This is called an indirect source.

The boundaries of an indirect source have to be marked with a lead-in that mentions the original author and an in-text citation that uses the abbreviation qtd. in to show that the source you are citing is not the origin of the idea.

It will look something like this:

Ecology scholars Siderelis and Salinas have discovered that “parks in warmer climates are more costly to manage” (qtd. in Smith et al. 12778).

In the example above, the authors of the idea that the student wants to use are Siderelis and Salinas, but the student doesn’t have access to that article, so they can’t cite it. Instead, they have to cite the research source they do have, which is by Smith, Wilkins, and Leung. The lead-in is Ecology scholars Siderelis and Salinas have discovered. A lead-in for an indirect source has to mention Siderelis and Salinas because they are the original authors. The in-text citation is (qtd in Smith et al. 12778), which shows the reader that the student found this idea in the article by Smith, Wilkins, and Leung. There won’t be any citation at the end of the essay for the article by Siderelis and Salinas. Instead the full citation in the Works Cited will be for the source by Smith, Wilkins, and Leung because that’s where the student actually read the idea.