Knowing What You Must Acknowledge

According to The Little, Brown Handbook,

You must always acknowledge other people's independent material - that is any facts or ideas that are not common knowledge or your own. The source may be anything, including a book, an article, a movie, an interview, a microfilmed document, a Web page, a newsgroup posting, or an opinion expressed on the radio. You must acknowledge summaries or paraphrases of ideas or facts as well as quotation of the language and format in which ideas appear: wording sentence structures, arrangement, and special graphics (such as a diagram).

You need to acknowledge another's material no matter how you use it, how much of it you use, or how often you use it. Whether you are quoting a single important word, paraphrasing a single sentence, or summarizing three paragraphs, and whether you are using the source only once or a dozen times, you must acknowledge the original author every time. (Fowler and Aaron 633)

Use the checklist below to hep you recognize types of sources and on using quotations, paraphrases, summaries and citations. All page numbers refer to the 10th Edition of The Little, Brown Handbook.

Type of Source

Are you using

• your own independent material (chapter 45b, page 632),
• common knowledge (chapter 45b, page 632), or
• someone else's independent material (chapter 45c, pages 633-635)?

You must acknowledge someone else's material with the following:

1. a signal phrase to introduce the source (chapter 44e, pages 625-627),
2. a citation after the source (chapter 47a, pages 647-656), and
3. a listing on a "works cited" page of all the works that you have cited in your text (chapter 47b, pages 656-686).

• Do all quotations exactly match their sources? Be sure to check them. (See chapter 44d, pages 620-621.)
• Have you inserted quotation marks around quotations that are run into your text? (See chapter 44d, page 621, and chapter 31, pages 468-475.)
• Have you shown omissions with ellipsis marks and additions with brackets? (See chapter 32d and chapter 32e, pages 483-486.)
• Does every quotation have a source citation? (See chapter 45c, pages 633-634, and chapter 47a, pages 648-656.)

Paraphrases and Summaries

• Have you used your own words and sentence structures for every paraphrase and summary? (See chapter 44d, pages 617-618.)
• If not, use quotation marks around the original author's words. (See chapter 45c, pages 633-634, and chapter 47a, pages 648-656.)
• Does every paraphrase and summary have a source citation? (See chapter 44d, pages 617-620.)

Source Citations

• Have you acknowledged every use of someone else's material in the place where you used it? (See chapter 44d, pages 617-622; chapter 44e, pages 623-627; chapter 45c, pages 633-635; and chapter 47b, pages 647-656.)
• Does your list of works cited include all the sources you have used? (See chapter 47b, pages 656-689 and chapter 48, pages 720-723.)

Fowler, H. Ramsey, and Jane E. Aaron. The Little, Brown Handbook. 10th ed. New York: Pearson, 2007.