Treatment of sources

This is a crucial matter, and students surprisingly often get it badly wrong. You should have been taught how to do this long before you get as far as whatever essay you have just written, and I find it shocking if you haven't.

The key points are these:

1. At all times make an absolutely clear distinction between your ideas, comments, thoughts, and so on, and those of others.

2. We are only really interested in your ideas.

Obviously, particularly if you are writing some sort of historical account, you have to use secondary sources: your information must come from somewhere.

Let us know where it comes from!

If you don't, you can be accused of plagiarism: copying someone else's ideas without attribution. This is either a cardinal sin or a terrible error, and whichever it is, it is punished very seriously: the normal penalty is a mark of 0. Zero.

So if you paraphrase someone's opinions, only do this (a) with clear and explicit attribution and (b) in order to add further opinions of your own. If you offer such a paraphrase as your own work, this is, strictly speaking, plagiarism.

I stress this point because I frequently get essays where students have simply, for quite long stretches of text, paraphrased my lectures. The fact that I make it easy to do this, by putting the lectures on the Web, doesn't mean that that's what I want you to do! I do it partly because before the Web existed I would still get paraphrases of my lectures, but often in a totally garbled form, which made very embarrassing reading. Now at least I get reasonably accurate paraphrase. However, that's exactly what I don't want. I appreciate the innocence of it: you are obviously not trying to fool me into thinking that my work is yours, and may be even feeling that you are paying me a compliment. But actually what it does is to fill me with something approaching horror, as I think of the risk these innocent people are running. If they can innocently paraphrase one of my lectures in an essay for me, then they are obviously going to be using other paraphrases in exactly the same way, without attribution, and courting the penalty of zero for plagiarism.

You must understand that the only point of writing an essay is in expressing your own ideas, and this is what gets most of the marker's attention. To paraphrase a lecture that you have printed out in front of you is no great intellectual feat. The only way you can show your own quality is to comment on, disagree with, or otherwise develop the material you have summarised; and to do that you must make it clear that you the material is not your own work.

So an essay can be said to have two components. One is material that you have got from research, which may include opinions as well as factual material. This is simply the foundation of the essay, a necessary infrastructure; it is not the essay itself. The real essay is the use you make of this material, the structure you build on this infrastructure. You can't have the structure of course without the foundation; but an essay that consists of just foundation is almost no essay at all; certainly not at University level.