34 Using Sources in your Writing

College writing tests how well you can use information from a source in your own writing. In high school, students mostly just add quotations to their texts, which is useful sometimes, but if we quote too often our own ideas don’t get to shine.

An extra challenge is that your topic may not match the issues discussed in our readings for this essay. This means you’ll need to really focus on borrowing ideas from these authors instead of just their words.

Consider Bharati Mukherjee’s essay, “Two Ways to Belong in America.” Her topic is immigration, with a subtopic of family conflict. It’s an excellent piece of writing, but it seemingly has nothing to do with a different topic like drug use or climate change–topics some of you have chosen to discuss. Yet you’re expected to make use of her ideas (or someone else’s) in your essay. How do we do that??

For starters, resist the temptation to think that her essay “has nothing to do” with your topic. Her writing is full of great ideas, and many ideas have universal application, regardless of the topic.

How to integrate an author’s ideas.

One way is simply by comparison. Look for similarities and then draw the lines from her idea to your topic.

Mukherjee speaks often about how people grow to tolerate their living conditions, embracing what they like, rejecting what they don’t like (270). That’s certainly similar to how we think about other issues like climate change or drug use. Some people embrace “soft” drugs like caffeine and cannabis, but reject “harder” ones like cocaine and meth. Some say try to reduce their carbon footprint by recycling but continue to drive gas-guzzling SUVs.

Another way is by principle. If Mukherjee makes a general statement about her narrow topic, you can apply that generalization to your topic as well.

Mukherjee says that people often expect to be loved; that they usually assume the RIGHT to be loved (269). But this idea that isn’t limited to immigration. The world is full of needy people whose actions–both good and bad–are motivated through a desire for love.

As for your paper, can you think of how these principles might apply to YOUR topics?

Notice that for both of these examples, I didn’t QUOTE Mukherjee at all. Her specific sentences are too focused on immigration to be useful quotations. Instead, I borrowed her ideas and glued them to my own topic and examples.

Make sure you still cite!

Keep in mind that using an author’s ideas still counts as USING the source, so you still have to give them credit. This is just good manners, if you think about it. My examples above still mention the author (attribution) and give the page number where I found the idea (citation). You need to do this as well.

The slides below show the ways to properly give credit to authors when you use their ideas.