Assignment+Writing

=How to create an assignment that your teacher wants to read=

Internet research can be a very passive knowledge gathering technique - meaning sometimes students are not very actively engaged in what they are doing and are not really learning anything during the research process. The exercises to follow are designed to help you create the kind of assignments that your teachers wants to read and at the same time encourage you to read, think and evaluate the information that you come across while researching via the Internet.

[|YOU QUOTE IT, YOU NOTE IT!] Explains the basics of avoiding plagiarism by learning why, when, and how to cite. Is one of a series of modules developed by librarians in the Vaughan Memorial Library at Acadia

[|CREDIBLE SOURCES COUNT!] Outlines some questions to ask yourself when evaluating what you find on the web. Is one of a series of modules developed by librarians in the Vaughan Memorial Library at Acadia

[|SWITCH] SILT is a web resource created for all students, staff and faculty of the **SWITCH library consortium**. Its purpose is to help teach library and research skills. Each of the tutorials takes about 10-15 minutes to complete. They can be completed during a class or on one's own time. At the end of each section there is a short quiz.

Summarising - What is it? Why should you care?
Summarising is an essential skill to ensure that the work you hand in to your teacher is not simply chunks of other people's work that you have **copy and paste** from an Internet site into a Word Document. When you copy and paste from a website into your assignment and do not let your teacher know that the words and ideas in your assignment are not yours but in fact somebody else's you are doing something that we call plagiarism. **Plagiarism** comes from the Latin word - to kidnap. Plagiarism is a lazy way to learn - in fact it is probably questionable whether you learn anything at all this way.

It is very easy to avoid plagiarism. One, you can **give credit where credit is due**. This involves including a **Reference List** at the end of your assignment of all the books/websites/magazines etc that you have used to gather information for your assignment and using **In-Text Referencing** throughout your assignment whenever you copy someone else's words exactly or paraphrase them (change them around a bit).

Another way is to practice how to summarise the information you find, think about it, evaluate it and then add it to your assignment using your own words. Summarising is basically **picking out** the **main details** and **ideas** from a piece of text and writing/typing these down in your own words.

Exercise 1 - Roald Dahl Biography
The following exercise requires you to read a brief account the childhood of the author Roald Dahl. You are then required to summarise the main points of this account in a Word document. There are several rules which must be followed:


 * Rule 1:** You **MUST NOT** Copy and Paste
 * Rule 2:** You **MUST NOT COPY** and Paste
 * Rule 3:** You **MUST NOT COPY AND PASTE**
 * Rule 4:** If you don't know what a particular word means - use a **DICTIONARY** (print/online) and find out what it means


 * To Begin:** Click on the website below.

[|Roald Dahl Biography]


 * Read** the first section of this Biography - **Early Life**

Pick out the details about Roald Dahl that you think are the most important **eg**