Schminformation Schmitteracy
When you ask “Who is the author? Are any credentials given? Who is the publisher?” you are trying to establish this.
The thing that comes after the information you’ve borrowed.
What is a parenthetical citation?
If all else fails, ask this person.
Who is the librarian?
In these, you don’t use all the information in the passage; you prioritize what is most important in the passage and relevant to your point.
What are summaries?
You attack a person's personal traits instead of his or her argument.
What is ad hominem?
When you question whether someone is really committed to discovering truth/goodness (or whether they intend to sell you something, convert you to an ideology, win votes, etc.), you are trying to establish this.
What is bias?
If you are using a source for the first time, both of these should go in your signal tag if at all possible.
What is the author's name and title of the work?
In academic research databases, you should filter your search so that you only get sources of the highest quality, called this.
What are scholarly or peer-reviewed sources?
In these, you use all the information in the passage—only you use your own words and sentence structure.
What are paraphrases?
You asserted something is true simply because it is a popular belief.
What is bandwagon?
When it comes to evaluating information, there is no substitute for being able to identify these errors in thought.
What are logical fallacies?
When your source is over four full lines, you must use this kind of format to cite it.
Generally, these types of sources should be no more than five years old.
What are scientific sources?
If you aren’t quoting directly but relaying the information in another way, the only words that can stay the same are these.
What are proper nouns?
You picked a fight with an argument nobody actually makes.
What is strawman?
When trying to establish accuracy, you should always see if these are listed.
This kind of plagiarism occurs when you lift entire passages from a source and do not cite them properly.
What is flagrant plagiarism?
This is like a works cited page, only it has notes summarizing the source and saying how it relates to the point you are trying to make.
What is an annotated bibliography?
You use this to eliminate information from a quotation.
What is an ellipsis?
Circular reasoning; you assumed the answer before you asked the question. "Cigarettes are deadly. Why? Because they kill you."
What is begging the question?
If a number or statistic is ever cited, you should always ask this question.
What is "who counted?"
This kind of plagiarism occurs when you cite some things, but you do not carefully disclose where each bit of information has come from (differentiating between your material and that of your multiple sources).
What is piecemeal plagiarism?
Or = “search terms are interchangeable,” And = “must include both search terms,” and Not = “exclude this search term.” These are examples of what?
What are boolean operators?
You use these to add or change a few words to a quotation.
What are brackets?
You said Z was caused by Y simply because Y comes before Z.
What is post hoc?