USING SOURCES: tips on what to cite

The following essay is taken from: Henry M. Sayre, WRITING ABOUT ART. Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.

I am constantly surprised at the number of students who seem to be
embarrassed that they have consulted research materials. To the
contrary, doing so shows energy, interest and determination. The only
times you need to worry about using such materials - except, of course,
when the professor, for whatever reason, asks you not to consult
secondary sources - is when you have done a superficial job, consulting
only one or two books or articles and, more important, when you have
not acknowledged that you have done so. If you do research, do it
well. If you appropriate phrases, whole passages, ideas - even if you've
put these in you own works - or the logic of an argument from someone
else, and you fail to acknowledge it, then you have plagiarized the work.
The penalties for plagiarism vary from school to school, but they are
never very pleasant.

The point is that if you use research materials well - as the beginning of
you argument, not as an end in themselves - then you need never be
embarrassed to cite these materials. In fact, one of the checks you can
use to judge the quality of your own paper is to determine at the draft
stage just how much of YOU there is in the paper. If you detect
more of your absence from the argument than your presence, if you feel
that one solution might to go back and convert some quotations into your
own words, then you have probably not entered into a dialogue with the
criticism so much as let the criticism rule you. In order to revise, engage
the criticism. See if you can push its ideas further, perhaps by using it to
analyze a particular work, a work with which it hasn't dealt.

You do not, of course, need to footnote or acknowledge anything
that could be considered common knowledge - dates of birth and
death, the location of paintings, historical facts, the definitions of words,
and so on (unless you are quoting directly). Generally, if a question of
interpretation seems to enter into the material, or if the fact seems
genuinely new, then by all means cite your source. When in doubt, play it
safe. But again, watch for over citation. If you consistently have more
than two or three footnotes per typed page, then something is wrong -
either you are acknowledging things you need not acknowledge or your
argument is too dependent on outside sources..

(In other words, you must acknowledge your source when:

             1. you quote directly from a book or article

             2. paraphrase or summarize someone's words

             3. when you borrow an idea that is not common knowledge.)


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