You
are asked to select one of the books on the list supplied below and used it to write a
scholarly book review of 5-7 pages (2000-2800 words) at 1.5 line spacing.
my book choice is: The Victorian Soldier in Africa by : Edward Spiers.
Book reviews
should be organised around one central question: what is this book’s contribution to our
understanding of the relationship between war and society?
Style Sheet
This is the style sheet which you must follow for the book review or document study. You must use the Chicago
Style. That said, most of your citations are likely to be from the text of the one book that you have selected for
review (or the publication that is the subject of the document study), and you should follow the syntax for citing
from a book given below, using the example of a quotation from p. 45.
Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: reading together in the eighteenth-century house (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 45.
Such
citations can be given as parenthetical references, or as footnotes/endnotes using the general Chicago Style.
Plagiarism (and how to avoid it)
Undergraduates in History courses must follow correct procedures when writing History research papers. That means taking notes carefully and writing papers carefully. It means following the correct citation practices for History Research Papers.
First –some general terms.
verbatim—means, ‘word for word’
a citation –is the note you include to indicate where the information or words you borrowed can be located. A citation can take two forms –that of an endnote (located at the end of the paper, in a list), or a footnote (located at the foot of the page). I don’t care which you use. Endnotes and footnotes need to be numbered –and corresponding numbers need to be placed in the text of your paper adjacent to the material you are sourcing.
To paraphrase –means to put information in your own words. But be very careful here –Paraphrasing is not changing some words, or flipping word order, etc. And even if you paraphrase, you still need to cite –because you are still indebted for the information, even if it is in your own words.
Now that we understand the terms and concepts, here are the golden rules as they pertain to plagiarism;
Anytime a unique word, a series of words, or a sentence that you did not write yourself, appears in your essay, you must indicate the nature of your borrowing, and the proper way to do this is through the inclusion of both quotation marks (around the relevant borrowed words) and a citation (a footnote or endnote at the end of each sentence, containing the necessary bibliographic information).
You must also cite your sources for specific facts, dates, and events that are not commonly known.
And you must cite the general interpretations and arguments that you borrow, even if you do not quote from them word for word.
