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Stretch · English 9 · Lesson 6

Research & Citing Sources

Research doesn’t start with an answer you already like. It starts with a question sharp enough that you genuinely don’t know how it ends — and it finishes with a paper trail that proves the thinking was really yours.
🪛A Question, Not a Topic
Most research goes wrong in the first ten minutes, and it goes wrong the same way: someone picks a topic and calls it a question. Topics are enormous and have no answer — you can read about them forever and never be finished.
“The Dust Bowl” A TOPIC — enormous, no answer, never finished what caused the Dust Bowl? better — but an encyclopedia already answers that who? · when? · where? · so what? How did federal soil-conservation programs change farming practices on the southern Plains between 1935 and 1940? narrow enough to answer · open enough that you don’t know the ending · settleable by evidence
📣 Weak questions have tells. If the answer is obviously yes — “Was the printing press important?” — there is nothing to investigate. If no evidence could ever settle it — “Which century was the best?” — it belongs in a debate club. If you can answer it from memory, it’s trivia. Expect your question to sharpen as you read; that is the process working, not failing.
🎚Credibility Is Three Questions, Not a Feeling
Credibility is not something you get from a website’s color scheme. It is the result of three specific tests: who made this, when, and why.
AUTHORITY real expertise or access to this exact claim? a cardiologist on glaciers: no CURRENCY recent enough for this field? Roman roads: fine. Web privacy: no PURPOSE to inform, persuade, entertain, or sell? persuading isn’t disqualifying — just check it 🔍 LATERAL READING · THE SINGLE MOST USEFUL RESEARCH HABIT Don’t stay and study the page. Leave it — open new tabs and find out what OTHER sources say about it. A site’s own About page always says it is trustworthy, and that is easy to fake.
Pair it with click restraint: don’t grab the first search result reflexively — scan the whole results page, then choose on purpose. Stanford researchers gave professional fact-checkers, PhD historians, and university students the same unfamiliar websites; the fact-checkers reached accurate verdicts fastest, mainly because they left the page within seconds while everyone else stayed and studied the design.
📜Primary vs. Secondary — and the Flip
Neither family outranks the other. Primary sources hand you evidence nobody has chewed for you; secondary sources hand you context, expertise, and the ongoing argument you are joining. Strong papers use both, for different jobs.
⏳Primary sourceCreated by a participant or witness at the time, or the raw material itself: a soldier’s letter, a treaty, a photograph, a payroll ledger, a census table, a lab’s data set, the novel you are analyzing.
📚Secondary sourceStands outside the event and examines it afterward, usually by studying primary sources: a textbook, a biography, a documentary, a critic’s essay.
📖 ONE OBJECT: a 1955 high-school history textbook IF YOUR QUESTION IS… “How was the Revolutionary War fought?” → SECONDARY IF YOUR QUESTION IS… “How did 1950s American schools TEACH the Revolutionary War?” → PRIMARY The category describes the source’s relationship to your question — not a permanent property of the object sitting on the shelf.
🔄Three Honest Ways In — All Three Get Cited
“QuoteCopy the exact words inside quotation marks. Use it when the wording itself is the evidence, or the phrasing is too distinctive to rebuild.
🔨ParaphraseRestate one passage in your own words and your own sentence structure, at about the same length. The workhorse move — rebuilding an idea proves you understood it.
📏SummarizeCompress a long stretch — a chapter, an article, a study — into a short account of its main point, in your own words.
Quoting is not more honest than paraphrasing. They are different tools, and both borrow something that was not yours — so all three moves finish the same way: with a citation. Every time.
❌ PATCHWRITING — still plagiarism
Keeping the source’s sentence skeleton and swapping in synonyms. The rhythm and architecture are still theirs; only the vocabulary is yours.
It counts even with a citation attached, because the language isn’t yours and hasn’t been marked as a quotation.
✅ THE CURE IS MECHANICAL
Read the passage. Close the tab. Write what it meant from memory. Then reopen the source and check two things: that you got the meaning right, and that the wording came out different.
If you can’t say it without the source in front of you, you don’t understand it yet — which is genuinely useful information.
🧾MLA: Two Marks That Have to Match
Be blunt about who citation protects: it protects you. It is visible proof that you did the reading, that the claim isn’t something you invented at midnight, and that any doubter can go check. That is the entire engine of scholarship — claims that can be retraced.
IN-TEXT CITATION · RIGHT AFTER THE BORROWED MATERIAL The narrator refuses to look away (Okonkwo 214). author’s last name + page number  ·  no comma  ·  no “p.”  ·  punctuation goes outside the parenthesis they must match Works Cited Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. “Plagiarism Overview.” Purdue Online Writing Lab, Purdue University, owl.purdue.edu/owl/avoiding_plagiarism/index.html. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026. hanging indent: every line after the first alphabetized by the author’s last name — by title when there is no author
Learn the pattern once and any source becomes citable. MLA builds every entry from the same list of elements, using the ones that exist and skipping the ones that don’t:
1 author2 title of source3 title of container4 other contributors5 version6 number7 publisher8 date9 location
🔑Key Terms
❔Research questionA narrow, genuinely open question that drives a project — not a topic. Settleable by evidence, and expected to sharpen as you read.
🎚CredibilityTrust a source has actually earned, judged by authority (expertise on this claim), currency (recent enough for this field), and purpose (inform, persuade, entertain, sell).
⏳Primary sourceEvidence created by a participant or witness at the time, or the raw material itself.
📚Secondary sourceA work that stands outside an event and analyzes it afterward, usually by studying primary sources.
🔍Lateral readingEvaluating an unfamiliar source by leaving it and opening new tabs to see what others say about it — instead of judging the page by its design.
🔨ParaphraseRestating one passage in your own words and your own sentence structure, at about the same length — and still cited.
📏SummaryCompressing a long stretch of a source into a short account of its main point, in your own words — also cited.
🚫PlagiarismPresenting someone else’s words, sentence structure, or ideas as your own — including patchwriting, which counts even when cited.
👣CitationThe pair of marks that credits a source: a short in-text pointer, MLA-style (Okonkwo 214), plus a matching full entry at the end.
🧾Works CitedThe alphabetized list of every source you actually cited. MLA calls it Works Cited; “bibliography” is broader and can include works you only consulted.
🌍Where These Habits Already Run
🌐WikipediaIts central rule isn’t “be true” — it’s “be verifiable.” Any challenged claim must point to a published source, which is why you meet [citation needed] tags. That is also why it’s an excellent place to find sources and a poor place to cite one: the real research is in the reference list at the bottom.
📰NewsroomsName the source when you can, confirm a claim with a second independent one, print a correction when it turns out wrong. When a big story collapses publicly, the post-mortem almost always finds that someone skipped the second source.
💃“Plagiarism” comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning “kidnapper.” The Roman poet Martial used it around 80 CE to complain that a rival was passing off Martial’s verses as his own — the insult has been attached to stolen writing for nearly two thousand years.
📖MLA style is maintained by the Modern Language Association, a scholarly organization founded in 1883. The rules get revised periodically — the current guidance taught by Purdue’s writing lab is the ninth edition — so “which edition are we using?” is a completely fair question to ask a teacher.
📌Remember This
1A research question is narrow, genuinely open, and settleable by evidence — and it should get sharper as you read, not stay frozen from day one.
2Judge credibility with three tests — authority, currency, purpose — and check them by reading laterally in new tabs, never by staring at the page’s design.
3Quote, paraphrase, or summarize: all three are honest, and all three require a citation. Patchwriting is plagiarism even when it’s cited.
🤔 Think about it
Pick a claim you believe strongly. Can you trace it back to an actual primary source, or does the trail stop at “someone said it”? What specific piece of evidence would change your mind?
If citations exist so readers can retrace your steps, what should a citation do for a source that can vanish — a deleted post, an edited webpage, a removed video? What is an “Accessed 14 Mar. 2026” date actually protecting?
⭐ The Works Cited page is not a boring chore you tack on at eleven at night. It is the receipt — the proof that every claim in your paper can be walked back to where it came from.
✏️ ClickClass Anchor Chart · Stretch English 9 · Research & Citing Sources
From ClickClass — hundreds of free printables at clickclassedu.com/printables