two good questions about citations

A student just emailed me a couple questions, asking if they needed to cite a source if they were just paraphrasing from that source, and asking about the Works Cited that appears at the end of the paper.  I answered her question below.  I put the answers in the form of a paragraph that might appear in a research paper about writing research papers!  Here it is:



Paraphrasing is "a restatement of a text or passage giving the meaning in another form" (dictionary.com).  It is perfectly acceptable to do this, because you are still giving credit to the original author.  Even a prestigious university like Purdue University includes information on this process:  "If you are paraphrasing an idea from another work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication in your in-text reference, but APA guidelines encourage you to also provide the page number" (Purdue Online Writing Lab).  In this case, we are not concerned with page numbers, since we are dealing with online sources.



Using EasyBib.com, this would be the Works Cited for the two online sources I used in the above paragraph:

"Paraphrase | Define Paraphrase at Dictionary.com." Dictionary.com | Find the Meanings and Definitions of Words at Dictionary.com. Web. 12 Sept. 2010. <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paraphrase>.

"Purdue OWL." Welcome to the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL). Web. 12 Sept. 2010. <http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/02/>.



I hope you find this helpful!  (Thanks, Elena!)