1. ACADEMIC WRITING
SUPPORTING DETAILS AND OUTSIDE
SOURCES
Mgs. Paúl González T.

2. SUPPORTING DETAILS: FACTS,
QUOTATIONS, AND STATISTICS
Academic writing normally requires that you
support your ideas and opinions with facts,
statistics, quotations, and similar kinds of
information. It is possible for you to get these
kinds of supporting details from outside
sources such as books, magazines,
newspapers, web sites, personal interviews,
and others.

3. USING OUTSIDE SOURCES
Where can we find specific supporting details
to support our ideas?
 Personal experience
 Gather quotations and statistics by
performing an experiment, taking a survey,
or interviewing people
 In the library
 On the Internet

4. There are three ways to insert outside
information into your own writing:
1.We can quote it
2. We can summarize it
3. We can paraphrase it

5. PLAGIARISM
• It is using someone else’s words or ideas
as if they were our own, and it is a serious
offense.
• When we use information from an outside
source without acknowledging that source,
we are guilty of plagiarism.
• One way to avoid plagiarism is to always
put quotation marks around words that you
copy exactly.
• We are guilty of plagiarism if we fail to cite
the source of outside information even if
we are paraphrasing

6. Citing a source means to tell where
you got the information.
Citing a source is a two-step process:
Insert a short reference in parentheses at
the end or at the beginning of each piece
of borrowed information. This short
reference is called an in-text citation.
She stated, "Students often had difficulty using APA
style" (Jones, 1998, p. 199), but she did not offer an
explanation as to why.

7.  Prepare a list describing all our sources
completely. This list can be titled
“References” or “Works Cited” and
appears as the last page of your paper.
Duncan, G. J., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (Eds.). (1997).
Consequences of growing up poor. New York, NY:
Russell Sage Foundation.

8. QUOTATIONS
A quotation can be a sentence, several
sentences or a short paragraph.
Quotations from reliable and knowledgeable
sources are good supporting details.
There are two kinds of quotations

9. Direct: We copy another person’s exact
words and enclose them in quotation
marks.
Satzke states that:
"Plagiarism is the theft of someone else's words."
(2001, p 17)
Indirect: We report what other person said
without using quotation marks.
Satzke (2001) points out that plagiarism is a form
of theft.

10. If we want to introduce borrowed
information we can use the phrase
according to or a reporting verb such as:
assert declare maintain report
claim insist mention say
write suggest state

11. STATISTICS
They are good supporting details which
can be used with the previously mentioned
reporting verbs when citing.

12. THANK YOU