Friday 13 June 2008

Why do we cite sources? Why don't we cite?

We ran out of time this morning, but over the course of this term, the importance of sources will come up again and again. As you have probably already realised, some of your classmates wrote their paragraph about the van Gogh painting on page 165 of Quest without doing any research, whilst others did do some research. Both were perfectly acceptable approaches to the question, and both led to very good paragraphs. I was very happy with the variety in your answers.

Apart from the very specific questions in my first email this morning, and the equally specific questions we discussed in room 201, I have a more general question that you might like to think about and comment on here:

Why do writers cite sources?
What are the most important reasons?
What are not very important reasons?

2 comments:

  1. I think we should cite sources to make our sentences more reliable.However,our sources should be acceptd by most of people or this would make our sentences weak.

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  2. I think A makes two important points in his comment. His second point, that any source we cite "should be acceptd by most of people", was what worried me about Hong's use of Wikipedia as a source. How do we decide what makes a source acceptable or not?

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