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Never be tempted to make a scissors and paste patchwork of other people’s
writing. Always try to put material into your own words and never incorporate
sections from elsewhere without attributing them. This practice can easily be
detected by putting sections of text into Google, or using plagiarism-detection
software like Turnitin, which will give the percentage of plagiarized material, the
source and the actual phrases or sentences (see Figure 3.1 for an example), and
you will be heavily penalized. Universities and colleges take a very strong line on
plagiarism.
Use direct quotes only when:
• someone very important said something very significant
• the point is very surprising, and the exact wording is important
• the point is beautifully, succinctly or wittily expressed.
An example of the last would be these lines of Alexander Pope’s:
True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.
ACHIEVING GOOD OUTPUTS 99
(Pope, 2004, l. 297–298)
Put quotes in double quotation marks or, for a longer quote (usually of about
40-plus words), in a separate indented paragraph, and always give the page
number of the source as well as the reference. Full guidelines for referencing are
given in Appendix 1.
Aim to vary the length of your sentences and avoid long, convoluted ones.
Short sentences and paragraphs are a good way of providing emphasis. Use
abbreviations, especially if you are writing to a tight time limit, but always
spell them out, with the abbreviation in brackets afterwards – e.g. intelligence
quotient (IQ) – the first time you introduce them. It shows you know what they
mean as well as being stylistically correct. (See the section on ‘Exam answers’
below, pages 127–8, for more thoughts on writing clearly in exams.)
Good use of punctuation will also help to make your meaning clearer. If you
are sceptical about this, consider the now famous example of the panda walking
into a bar who, after asking for some food, ‘eats, shoots and leaves’ as opposed
to ‘eats shoots and leaves’ (Truss, 2003). We quite often receive essays with
virtually no punctuation, making them very difficult to follow. The pressure of
university timetables may not always make this realistic, but checking your
punctuation is very much easier if you come back to what you have written after a
day or so.