If you've ever written a term paper, academic paper, an article of your own ideas, or just prepared a post with analytics — you know how easy it is to deal with intentional or unintentional plagiarism without realizing it. And that's because one of the most underrated habits is to properly format your sources. It would seem that you take an idea, paste it in, and write on. But no. If you don't indicate where the thought was taken from, it's no longer analytics, but borrowing. Proper citation matters.
Quoting is a simple and powerful means of showing that you respect someone else's hard work and understand where your thought ends and someone else's begins. Here are a few instances when you should use quotes:
- Using someone else's wording verbatim;
- Building on someone else's idea, even if you paraphrase it in your own words;
- Citing data from studies, reports, publications, unique articles.
Here are a few practical tricks on how to do it correctly: