Academic Skills: Note-taking, Source of Information, Plagiarism, Referencing and Paraphrasing, Presentation Skills

This report discusses various academic skills like note-taking, recognizing sources of information, plagiarism, referencing and paraphrasing, and presentation skills. It explains the importance of reliable sources of information and how to avoid plagiarism. The report also provides examples to help understand the concepts better.

Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Note-taking .....................................................................................................................................2
Source of information......................................................................................................................3
Plagiarism .......................................................................................................................................3
Referencing and Paraphrasing.........................................................................................................4
Presentation skills ...........................................................................................................................5
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................5
References .......................................................................................................................................5

Introduction
A student's life is a whole lot of learning experiences which helps them growing and
developing various academic skills. Academic skills are the set of many aspects such as writing,
learning, listening, speaking, growing interest in certain art work, reasoning etc. This report
focuses on various academic skills that are beneficial in a students life like note-making,
recognising sources of information and differentiating among the genuine one and fake ones.
Information regarding plagiarism is also mention in this report along with evaluation of topics
like paraphrasing and referencing in the report. Many presentation skills have also been
elaborated in this report.
Note-taking
Note taking is the recorded information that is to be practised from different platforms
and sources. Throughout history in human development note making has been the integral part,
today in every modern school, university, institution and academies students take notes and use
that notes for reference after completing their studies(Fortuna and et al, 2019). Taking notes
permits you to survey fascinating focuses from what you are investigating, perusing or paying
attention to. Composing notes in a way that would sound natural to you, likewise called note
making, makes everything more clear for the note taker while returning to the material. Note-
making has proved to be beneficial in gathering data in a manner that is more suitable and
understandable to the writer. For example when I was in school most of the times the teachers
would teach the classes in an hurry and I being a slow grabber of new information had to note
down all the important topics which later helped me during my studies at home.

Source of information
In the recent years, due to the hike in technological advancement and strong marketing
strategies in the market there is a huge load of information readily available to the users. There
are various sources of information available like internet, books, magazine publisher,
encyclopedia, new paper, depository library etc. But on the con side of such development is that
all of these sources are not dependable due to fake and plagiarised content that have been
uploaded. On basis of dependability on source of information, it has been further divided into
two categories namely; reliable and non-reliable sources of information. The sources on which
the user can depend for being original and not been pirated by any form are called reliable
sources of information for example content that has been published by the legitimate authors
related to the field(De Ridder, Rutten, K & Van Bauwel, 2021). And when the the source of
information that has been introduced can not be trusted about the content being factually correct
or not, it is known as non-reliable source of information for example Wikipedia, blogs, personal
websites etc. In order to distinguish between reliable and non-reliable source of information the
user can check for author's information as reliable sources present their content along with
author's information while non-reliable sources does not.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is the point at which someone uses another person's thoughts or words or
work without actually crediting the source and make them look like it as personal research or
observation. Committing plagiarism might save the users time for a short while but it comes as a
high price as it can be subjected to copyright and the user has to pay penalities with legal
procedures(Albluwi, 2019). Depending upon the institutional rules and regulations and the type
of plagiarism the user might fail in the academic course or even get suspended or expelled from
the university or working place. Few of the methods in order to avoid plagiarism are mentioned
below:
1. Try not to simply duplicate the work that is present in the source of information.
2. Foster by creation of personal style, by writing down the review and information that was
gained by the user.
3. Keeping good quality notes from the source of information which can be used while
writing down the given content.

4. Usage of quotes from popular leaders and personalities and writing their name right next
to it.
5. Usage of quotation marks can also aid while preventing from plagiarism.
Referencing and Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is an explanation that offers something that someone else has said or written
another way. Cambridge word reference characterizes it as to rehash something composed or
verbally expressed utilizing various words, frequently in a diverting structure or in a more
straightforward and more limited structure that makes the first importance more clear. Presently,
summarizing is an option in contrast to citing. Referencing means proving reference of the
source of information that has been used in the the report. In citing, the writer put the first
statement for what it's worth(Ochoa & Dominguez, 2020). In paraphrasing, changing the
sentence design of the given sentence to make an alternate rendition of a similar sentence.
Importance of paraphrasing is an approach to referring to a source without straightforwardly
citing it or of further making sense of a chose statement. Right rewording is significant as poor
summarizing can bring about allegations of counterfeiting, or replicating from a source without
accurately referring to it. Paraphrasing permits journalists to inspect the significance of others'
work, inventively reword their assertions, and art data to suit a paper or arrangement's objective
or concentration. During my class activity I was asked to research over the ancient monuments
that were constructed in Egypt. As I did not had much information over the topic I referred to
few books relating to the topic and it was stated by the teacher that any external help needs to be
acknowledged under references. So I wrote the book and authors name under reference in my
project.
Presentation skills
When a speaker is explaining or dictating some work to an audience there are various
vital skills that are needed for the speaker to perform this task and have a clear approach towards
the audience. This set of skills required to deliver the content to the audience is known as
presentation skills(Shi, Fazel & Kowkabi, 2018). Presentation skills includes elements like
control over voice, understanding the feedback and response of the audience, confidence in the

content that the speaker is delivering, listening to questions etc. Once during my school time me
and my friends were asked to present a group presentation and it was the first time any of us was
presenting anything in front of our class mates. All of us were very afraid about how was the
presentation going to work out as our academic marks were depending on it. When we told the
teacher about the issue, sir helped us in building up the confidence by illustrating five most
important skills about giving a good presentation which were:
 Loud and clear voice audible to everyone present.
 Self confidence while maintaining a good erect body posture
 Taking proper pauses after every sentence.
 Good preparation in order to avoid stammering.
 Including call to action
Conclusion
This report concludes elaborating various academic skills learnt with help of
presentations and note making. Various topics related to presentation like references,
paraphrasing various types of sources of information(reliable and non-reliable sources of
information) and plagiarism are also discussed in this report along with many examples.
References
Shi, L., Fazel, I., & Kowkabi, N. (2018). Paraphrasing to transform knowledge in advanced
graduate student writing. English for specific purposes, 51, 31-44.
Ochoa, X., & Dominguez, F. (2020). Controlled evaluation of a multimodal system to improve
oral presentation skills in a real learning setting. British Journal of Educational
Technology, 51(5), 1615-1630.
Albluwi, I. (2019). Plagiarism in programming assessments: a systematic review. ACM
Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), 20(1), 1-28.
De Ridder, S., Rutten, K., & Van Bauwel, S. (2021). On making ethical choices in ethnographic
research into (young) people’s mediated intimacy: a research note. Critical Arts, 1-9.
Fortuna and et al. (2019). The usefulness of YouTube™ videos as a source of information on
burning mouth syndrome. Journal of oral rehabilitation, 46(7), 657-665.