That's Not My Name

College assignments can be demanding, and the temptation of just copying and pasting a brilliant passage you found on the internet into your paper can be enticing. UNC’s Honor Code has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to plagiarizing, so it’s important to know how to properly cite your sources. In high school, it was usually acceptable to paraphrase information without citing its source because you don’t understand how to formulate the proper citations or whatever reason you may have, but ignorance is no longer an excuse in college. Citing information is crucial, and in our blog we’ll be sure to give credit where it is due. Citations help you develop an argument by integrating others’ ideas and providing credibility to your research by indicating which ideas are your own and which ones came from others. Citations also allow readers (like you!) to follow our information, validate our sources, and further explore the topic for yourself.


There are several formats to help you achieve these goals: APA formatting, MLA formatting, or Chicago style. All three of these formats allow readers to know from what source you gained your information from, where it can be found, and who coined the ideas integrated into your writing. Throughout this blog, we will provide online links to various sites when able; however, when this form of citations in unavailable, we will utilize a variation of MLA formatting. We feel that MLA formatting is the most widespread form for citations and the easiest to learn and implement in your writing.


Most of our sources will be online articles or blog posts; we’ll include the website, author's name, and date of publication so you can find the article for yourself. So here; try it out and check our source! http://www2.lib.unc.edu/instruct/citations/index.html?section=mla