Using and referencing sources
Activity 1
Using evidence effectively is an important skill for your writing at university. In this activity you will need to select the best way to integrate evidence from academic sources into a paragraph.
You are writing a paragraph about happiness as an emotion experienced at a particular moment.
You have found a text that you want to use for evidence:
Matt Killingsworth want to be happier stay in the moment.
In this text, the author, Matt Killingsworth, makes the following two points, which you want to refer to: 1. ‘I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences. It certainly seems that we’re going about our lives, that what we’re doing, who we’re with, what we’re thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness’. 2. ‘As it turns out, there is a strong relationship between mind-wandering now and being unhappy a short time later, consistent with the idea that mind-wandering is causing people to be unhappy’ (Killingsworth, 2012).
How will you integrate evidence from this source into your paragraph?
Select the best options from the choices provided.
Paragraph begins
Joy and delight are words that refer to experiences that occur at a particular moment; they are good feelings that are experienced as they happen. Happiness is commonly understood as this kind of feeling.
Drag the next sentence from the three options below into the box
Your answer
Feedback
This is a good option. It introduces an example to demonstrate the point you have just made. The direct quotation is introduced using the author’s surname and the date of publication. That works well to integrate the idea into your own writing.
Feedback
This is not a good option: it is not sufficiently different from the words Killingsworth used to be your own original work, but there is no source acknowledged. This could be regarded as plagiarism.
Feedback
This is too casual for academic style. In academic assignments you do not use authors’ first names, and a phrase like ‘methodologically innovative’ should be used instead of ‘very smart’ because it more accurate and relevant to the academic context. Also, a citation needs to include the date of publication
/div
Paragraph continues…
Killingsworth developed an app as a method of tracking large numbers of people’s feelings at random moments to try to understand more about how the momentary experience of happiness feels, what causes it, and what stops it.
Drag the next sentence from the three options below into the box
Your answer
Feedback
This will work well. There is no need for additional citation details here as it is clear which text is being referred to.
Feedback
This makes a much stronger claim than Killingsworth does, so it is misrepresenting his ideas. Killingsworth has not claimed to prove anything. He only provides experimental evidence for correlations between mind wandering and unhappiness.
Feedback
This is not an appropriate choice because it misinterprets Killingsworth’s position. His argument is the opposite; that unhappiness is associated with mind-wandering.
Paragraph ends
This research indicates that not only is happiness something that occurs at the present moment, but that it occurs most when a person is most attuned to the present moment.
Activity 2
In this paragraph, you discuss a contrasting position about what happiness is. You want to explore the idea that happiness is about how a person feels about their life’s meaning or achievement, which is associated with how they think about their memories.
For this paragraph you intend to draw upon evidence from these two sources:
In this article, the author, Jónína Einarsdóttir, writes ‘The aim is to understand how health professionals, who work under stressful conditions in an ethically sensitive ward, can counteract the negative sides of work too such a degree that they experience happiness’ (Einarsdottir 2012).
Daniel Kahneman the riddle of experience vs memory
In this talk, Daniel Kahneman considers two ways of thinking about happiness. As part of his evidence, he recounts a study that reviewed the pain experiences of colonoscopy patients. In summarising the findings of this study, he says: ‘What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated.’
How will you integrate evidence from this source into your paragraph?
Select the best options from the choices provided
Paragraph begins
In contrast, there are studies that explore happiness as a particular quality of memory. According to this perspective, how happy a person is depends upon whether they can create a narrative of their experiences that is valuable and meaningful.
Drag the next sentence from the three options below into the box
Your answer
Feedback
This is a good choice. The source of the information is acknowledged correctly. Beginning with the author’s surname is a good idea when introducing a summary as it clearly shows where the paraphrased material begins. The summary is concise and accurate. The reader can see this idea introduces a case study.
Feedback
This is not the best choice because it diverges too much from the topic of creating meaningful narrative and shifts the focus to positive attitude instead, which is something different. A sentence that introduces the study would be more appropriate.
Feedback
This is not a good choice. The wording is much too similar to the original to be a successful paraphrase, and there is no citation. This could be considered to be plagiarism.
Paragraph continues…
She discovered that these professionals consistently enjoyed their work, despite knowing that it was stressful, because they believed it to be valuable and felt professionally proud to be doing it. This sense of value, Einarsdottir argues, comes from the professionals’ ability to create and maintain meaningful narratives about their work that help them cope and bring them happiness.
Drag the next sentence from the three options below into the box
Your answer
Feedback
This is a good choice. Noting that this refers to additional evidence from a second study reminds the reader that there is a position being established.
Feedback
This is confusing because the phrase ‘the same thing’ does not relate to an idea from the preceding sentence.
Feedback
This does not contain a citation to acknowledge the source, and it is also too close in wording to the original text from Kahneman. This could be regarded as plagiarism, even though the wording has been changed a little, it is still clear that it has been taken from the talk without acknowledgement.
Paragraph ends
The patients who thought they had the best experiences were not those who experienced the least pain, but the ones whose actual momentary pain peaked and then decreased, because these patients could provide the story of their operation with a happy ending. These examples demonstrate that there is some compelling evidence that happiness is created within the stories humans use to make experience meaningful.