assess an open-access source for authority, purpose and currency, integrate it with a signal phrase and an MLA parenthetical citation, and explain why a specific paraphrase is not plagiarism.
Workbook: page 8 of your Unit 4 Student Workbook. Draft on paper first; anything scored is submitted online in this lesson.
Instruction
Two questions govern this lesson: should I use this source, and how do I put it in my paragraph without stealing it.
Vetting a source. “Is it reliable?” is too blunt to be useful. Ask four narrower questions.
- Authority. Who wrote it, and what puts them in a position to know? A university press monograph, a peer-reviewed article, a museum or library edition, an editor’s introduction to a scholarly text — these carry different weight from an essay-mill summary or an anonymous study guide. Note that authority is domain-specific: a classicist is an authority on Homer and not on Victorian medicine.
- Purpose. What was it written to do? An argument written to persuade is still usable — you simply have to represent it as an argument rather than as a fact.
- Currency. When was it written, and does that matter here? For a translation of Homer, 1900 is fine. For a claim about how nineteenth-century readers responded to Stevenson, a 1905 source is evidence and a 2019 source is scholarship, and you should know which one you are holding.
- Corroboration. Does any independent source say the same thing? A claim that appears in exactly one place, unrepeated, is a claim to attribute carefully and not to rely on.
Good open-access places to look for this paper: Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks for primary texts and their editorial apparatus; the Internet Archive for out-of-copyright scholarship; DOAJ and university open-access repositories for current articles; the Perseus Digital Library for the classical material. Wikipedia is a legitimate place to start and an illegitimate place to cite — use its reference list, then read what it cites.
Integrating a source. Never drop a quotation or a borrowed idea into a paragraph unattended. Three moves, always in this order:
- Signal phrase naming the source and framing its stance: The classicist Emily Wilson argues that…; Writing in 1897, Stevenson’s first biographer claimed that…
- The material, quoted or paraphrased.
- Your analysis, which must be longer than the borrowed material in the paragraph. If it is not, the paragraph belongs to the source.
MLA mechanics for this paper. Parenthetical author-page, punctuation outside: (Wilson 24). If the signal phrase already names the author, the parenthesis carries the page only: (24). A source with no page numbers — most web sources — takes the author’s name alone. Every in-text citation must correspond to a Works Cited entry, and every Works Cited entry must be cited in the text. Spell authors’ names correctly; a misspelt name in a citation is a failure of the citation, not a typo.
Paraphrase and plagiarism. A paraphrase that keeps the sentence structure and swaps synonyms is plagiarism with extra steps, even when cited. A real paraphrase reorganises the idea into your own syntax because you understood it. The reliable method: read the passage, close it, write what it said from memory, then reopen and check you have not reproduced any distinctive phrasing. And cite it — a paraphrase needs a citation just as a quotation does.
One line about language models, because it is a real question now. Text generated by an AI tool is not a source: it has no author in a position to know and no accountability for error. If you use one to help you understand a passage, that is study; if its sentences appear in your paper, that is a submission with none of your own thinking in it, and it is handled as plagiarism.
Reading: Two open-access sources to vet and cite: Butler (1900) and Stevenson (1892), with a worked key
S. Butler, Preface to the First Edition, in Homer, The Odyssey (1900), Project Gutenberg 1727; R. L. Stevenson, A Chapter on Dreams, in Across the Plains (1892), Project Gutenberg 614; retrieved 26 Sept. 2026 · SLS original; quoted passages are public domain (Butler, 1900; Stevenson, 1892)
Vet Source A and Source B with the four questions before you read the table, then compare your answers.
What is hosted. The lab asks you to vet two open-access sources and integrate one of them with a signal phrase and an MLA citation. This reading gives you two real, public-domain, open-access secondary sources on this semester’s two anchor texts, so you can practice every step even before you find your own, and then a worked key: a vetting table, three integrated citations, a paraphrase test and the Works Cited entries. Editions: Samuel Butler, preface to the first edition of his translation of Homer, The Odyssey (1900), Project Gutenberg eBook #1727, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1727; Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams,” in Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays (1892), Project Gutenberg eBook #614, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/614. Both retrieved 2026-09-26. The wording is the editions’. Everything outside the quotation blocks is SLS original. The lesson’s own example, a modern translator named Wilson, is a recent copyrighted work and is not hosted here; the worked examples use the two sources below so that every quotation can be checked on this page.
1. Two sources to vet
Read both quotations, then run the four questions of the lesson (authority, purpose, currency, corroboration) on each.
Source A: Butler, Preface to the First Edition (1900)
(2) That the poem was entirely written by a very young woman, who lived at the place now called Trapani, and introduced herself into her work under the name of Nausicaa.
Without, therefore, for a moment pretending to think that scholars generally acquiesce in my conclusions, I shall act as thinking them little likely so to gainsay me as that it will be incumbent upon me to reply, and shall confine myself to translating the “Odyssey” for English readers, with such notes as I think will be found useful.
Source B: Stevenson, A Chapter on Dreams (1892)
I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one, The Travelling Companion, which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that Jekyll had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person. For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies.
The meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary.
For the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the Brownies’.
2. The vetting table (SLS original)
| Question | Source A: Butler’s preface | Source B: Stevenson’s essay |
|---|---|---|
| Authority: who wrote it, and what puts them in a position to know? | The translator is an authority on what his own translation does and why he made it that way, which the preface says at length. On the authorship of the poem, he is making an argument from his own earlier book, and the preface itself admits that scholars in general have not agreed. | The author is the best available witness to what he remembers about writing his own book. He is not an independent witness to what the book means to readers. |
| Purpose: what was it written to do? | To present a translation, and to keep a disputed thesis alive in front of the readers of it. A persuasive purpose: use it as an argument, not as fact. | A playful essay that presents the writer’s imagination as a set of helpers called Brownies. The wit is doing work; treat the account as the author’s own framing of his process. |
| Currency: does the date matter for this claim? | For a claim about what a prose translation of 1900 looked like, it is exactly right. For the claim about who wrote the poem, it is a 1900 argument, not the current view, and you should say so. | For a claim about how Stevenson said the story came to him, 1892 is a primary account from the author’s lifetime. |
| Corroboration: does an independent source say the same? | The preface points to the author’s own earlier book and articles, which are not independent. Nothing in the quotation is corroborated. | The quotation names no independent witness. A careful writer would attribute the account to Stevenson and would not present it as established fact about the composition. |
3. Signal phrase, material, analysis: three worked integrations (SLS original)
Each paragraph has the three moves in order: a signal phrase that names the source and frames its stance; the material, quoted or paraphrased; the writer’s own analysis, which runs longer than the borrowed material. The sources have no page numbers, which is normal for web editions, so the parenthetical carries the author’s name alone; when the signal phrase already names the author, there is no parenthetical.
- Quotation, author not in the signal phrase. Stevenson, who wrote the tale, says his own imagination supplied only
the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary
(Stevenson). Everything else, by his account, was built while awake. This matters for a paper about the semester question, because it moves the source of Jekyll’s moral pattern from a dream to a decision, so that the pattern comes from the author’s deliberate design and not from accident. - Paraphrase, author in the signal phrase. In his 1900 preface, Butler concedes that scholars as a body do not accept his view that a young woman from Trapani wrote the poem, and he goes on translating anyway. A writer using this source should notice what that does to its weight: Butler’s translation can be trusted as a translation, but the preface is testimony about a minority theory, and a paper that treats it as settled has misread its own source.
- Disagreeing with a source, after representing it fairly. Stevenson credits the Brownies with the powders, saying critics have censured them, and he happily hands the blame to his dreams. But the powders are what turn a private wish into a procedure, and a reader can hold that this is exactly the point where the author, not the Brownies, is answerable for the design. (Stevenson gives the powders to the Brownies; I am arguing they are as much his responsibility as the rest.)
4. The paraphrase test, run once (SLS original)
Original (Stevenson). For the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all but the Brownies’.
Too close (fails). The matter of the powders, which so many have criticized, is, I am glad to report, not mine at all but the Brownies’. Every clause is in the source’s order and built the same way, with synonyms swapped. Adding a citation does not fix it, because the sentence is still Stevenson’s.
Genuine paraphrase (passes). Stevenson says the chemical device that critics complained about came from his dream-helpers and not from him (Stevenson). I closed the page before writing this sentence, and then checked that I had reused none of his distinctive phrasing except the names Brownies and powders, which I put in my own construction.
5. Two annotations and a Works Cited (SLS original)
Annotation for Source A (two sentences). Butler’s preface is a strong source for how a 1900 prose translator understood his job and for what he thought the poem was, because he writes about his own book. Its authority does not extend to the authorship theory, which he admits scholars do not generally share, and a 1900 date means it is evidence of one view then and not of current scholarship.
Annotation for Source B (two sentences). Stevenson’s essay gives the only first-hand account of how his book came to him, and it says which parts he claims to have dreamed. It is one person’s account, written for effect and unsupported by a second witness, so it can be cited for what Stevenson says and not for what happened in his head.
Works Cited (MLA).
Butler, Samuel. “Preface to First Edition.” The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Samuel Butler, 1900. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1727. Accessed 26 Sept. 2026.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. “A Chapter on Dreams.” Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays, 1892. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/614. Accessed 26 Sept. 2026.
6. Answers to the lesson’s quick items (SLS original)
- The Victorian-reader claim. The best support is an 1886 review of the kind described, plus a recent article that quotes and explains it. A contemporary reaction is primary evidence; the article adds context. A plot-summary blog, an unrelated monograph and an AI summary fail on authority or purpose.
- The synonym paraphrase. It is not acceptable. Citation fixes attribution, not borrowing of structure; section 4 above shows the test.
- The fill-in. The three gaps take a colon, an opening parenthesis and a closing parenthesis. The colon ends the frame sentence about what the parenthesis carries; the parentheses enclose the page number alone, because the signal phrase has already named the author; the sentence’s period follows the closing parenthesis. Where a source has no page numbers, as with both sources on this page, no parenthetical is needed once the author is named.
Formative check
Work through these before moving on. They are not graded — they tell you, and your teacher, whether the standard below has landed yet.
You want to claim that Victorian readers found Hyde’s appearance disturbing without being able to say why. Which source best supports that claim?
A paraphrase that follows the source’s sentence structure but replaces its words with synonyms is acceptable as long as it is cited.
When the signal phrase already names the author, the parenthetical citation carries the page number alone Wilson argues that the poem’s violence is deliberately excessive 24.
Find two open-access secondary sources for your research question. For each, write an annotation of exactly two sentences: what it contributes to your argument, and where its authority, purpose or currency limits it. Then write one paragraph using one of them — signal phrase, borrowed material, and your own analysis, with the analysis longer than the borrowing.
How confident are you that you can judge whether a source is authoritative for the specific claim I want to make with it?