English 9

As you know, this essay asks you to support an argument using evidence from the play, Romeo and Juliet. The expectation is that you will turn in your own thinking and writing. Thus for this essay, you should not rely on the words and even just the ideas of outside sources. Talking to your friends, your parents, your classmates, and your teachers is great; they expand your thinking. Obviously, for this essay, I wanted you to use the words given for your thesis sentence. But the rest of the paper should be yours. If you go to a site -- let's say Sparknotes -- and copy and paste their interpretations into your paper, you have plagiarized.

The Indiana University-Bloomington School of Education has a superb site about avoiding plagiarism.
It tells us (and I quote!) that to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

• You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
• You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that isn't common knowledge.
• You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
• You paraphrase (put into your own words) another person's spoken or written word.

Of course, you've been instructed to quote the play, so your essays should include Shakespeare's words! Just remember that the rest of your paper should be your thinking about his words, not the thinking of Mr. Cliff Notes or Ms. Book Rags or someone other than yourself.

Here's a flowchart provided by this website: https://www.indiana.edu/~istd/overview.html