Borrowing Material from Electronic Documents

In recent years, the proliferation of electronic documents and information sources has become an issue of increasing importance for student writing and research. CD-ROMs, on-line journals and encyclopedias, e-mail discussion lists, and Web sites of all sorts have made available a wealth of information to researchers. Caution must be exercised, however, to avoid plagiarizing material from these highly accessible sources.

• In the process of notetaking, avoid "copying and pasting" electronic source material directly into your notes. Otherwise, your notes will likely contain unattributed quotations or paraphrases that are subsequently incorporated into your papers as plagiarized material. Such simple mistakes typically result from the failure to observe basic writing procedures like proper notetaking and proofreading.
• The technique of "cutting and pasting" should not replace notetaking. In taking notes properly, you are not just transferring or transcribing information, but also developing and organizing original thoughts.
• Well-developed notetaking skills are particularly important with electronic documents because the ease of manipulating this information substantially increases the likelihood of sloppiness and errors, not to mention the probability of plagiarism.