The author's words need quote marks

Students seem to struggle with the idea of quoting and paraphrasing. I am not sure why that is: but students seem to fall between two extremes of behaviour. They either go full-noise, ultra-careful and treat all materials as if they are explosive and are all quotes (i.e. they bung a page number into every citation bracket when they don't have to); or they provide a citation, then copy the author's actual words without using quote marks, and don't supply a page number at all.

Of course, what we want them to do is to go about 80% to the full-noise end, and to only cite page numbers if they are actually quoting the author's words, and to mostly paraphrase what they are reading. 

Realistically, we don't want students to over-quote (read why here). We want them instead to write from essence, and to paraphrase most of what they read. This takes a lot of academic writing confidence, and three years in an undergrad programme is realistically not enough time to develop expertise at writing this way. But that undergrad learning will be invaluable if we later embark on a Masters or a PhD journey.

I had an interesting example the other day, where a student had just copied a list from an author's work. Because they had numbered the list differently, and there was lots of space between each quoted section, so I suspect that that they 'thought' that this didn't really constitute a quote. Sigh.

What they wrote was:

Which should have been - at the very least - formatted as:

Guideline for making ethical practise decisions (Anderson, 1996):

1. "Outline the extent of the ethical dilemma"
2. "Describe the central issues associated with the problem"
3. "Refer to professional, or agency, institutional or school, ethical guidelines, codes of practice, interagency agreements and to legislation that may have a bearing on resolution of the problem"
4. "Evaluate the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved, including those relevant to the practitioner, agency institutional or school colleagues, other professional colleagues, the agency itself and /or profession"
5. "Consider possible alternative decisions that may be taken" (p. 56).

Although it would have been better to have paraphrased this altogether.

Sam

Reference:

Anderson, R. (1996). Professionalism, ethics and the career counselling practitioner. New Zealand Journal of Counselling, 18(2), 50-58. https://nzac.org.nz/assets/Uploads/Journals/2.-Professionalism-Ethics-the-Career-Counselling-Practitioner.pdf