Suggestions for teaching students how to take notes without plagiarizing (conversation during May webinar)

[Janet Murray]

One of our webinar participants said that "taking all the sources and trying to create a writing piece without plagiarizing is the hardest part" of a culminating activity. She added, "they know about citing, paraphrasing, and quoting but the copy/cut/paste generation has a hard time."

I used an electronic note-taking form with my eighth graders. The directions specifically allowed them to cut and paste a portion of their source information, and THEN directed them to rewrite the information in their own words. http://janetsinfo.com/notesnew.doc

Mike suggested "give students a list of 3 facts from 3 different sources. Ask them to write a paragraph based on these 3 facts and be sure to cite the sources in context. Students need to be able to do this BEFORE they can move forward onto their own culminating project." He also recommends the paraphrasing exercises at Purdue's Online Writing Lab:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/619/1/