In order to find relevant information on the Internet and never have your professor accuse you of plagiarism, here are two simple steps to take:
1. Find vivid examples
A vivid example is usually a story of a person, a group of people, or a company (but preferably a person) that illustrates the main point of your essay.
For example, if you’re writing about how important college education is, you could very briefly tell a story of someone you know, or someone whose story is described on the Internet, about the success the person had after graduating from college.
You might also include a warning story about someone who keeps failing because of the lack of college education.
2. Summarize or Expand each example according to your needs
In your paper, you may choose to use a bunch of shorter examples, or just one or two that are longer and have more detail.
No matter what you come across on the Internet, you can make any example shorter or longer, depending on what you need, by Summarizing or Expanding.
Summarizing
If you’ve found a relevant story on the Internet, don’t copy and paste it into your paper. Instead, you could summarize it, which simply means tell that same story in fewer words.
If you’d like to learn how to summarize, here’s my tutorial on how to write a summary. But for now, here’s a quick example.
Let’s say you’re writing about natural disasters. And you read in the news about a family who lost its house. And the story goes something like this:
“John and Mary had been saving up money and investing in improving their land and growing cattle. The hurricane took most of their hard-earned property in an hour. The house was leveled; half of the cattle was killed; and now they can’t even gather the crops because their machinery needs serious repair.”
So, let’s summarize it:
“John and his wife Mary lost most of what they had, including the house, cattle, and some of their machinery, in the terrifying hurricane.”
Makes sense? You can rewrite ANYTHING in fewer words, according to your needs.
Expanding
You could also expand it, using your imagination. If a story you found on the Net is too short – it’s described in only a sentence or two, you can add some details to it.
Just use your imagination to come up with some vivid stuff. Just to use our previous example, if the story you found on the Net is just one sentence, treat it as a summary and turn it into a paragraph:
“John and his wife Mary lost most of what they had it the terrifying hurricane.”
You could expand it the following way:
“John and Mary had been saving up money and investing in improving their land and growing cattle. The hurricane took most of their hard-earned property in an hour. The house was leveled; half of the cattle was killed; and now they can’t even gather the crops because their machinery needs serious repair.”
We just turned 15 words into 52. And, of course, I made up the example.
I hope you now have a good idea of how to approach using the Internet for ideas. Here’s your takeaway from today’s lesson:
- If you need to use the Internet, look for concrete examples, not just general stuff
- Don’t copy the examples verbatim
- Summarize or Expand each example, depending on how many words or pages you need
- Feel free to use examples from your own life (or even imagination)
Questions? Comments? Post ‘em here.
Tutor Phil