Notetaking, Sources of Information, Referencing, Paraphrasing, Plagiarism and Presentation Skills

This report by Desklib discusses the importance of notetaking, sources of information, referencing, paraphrasing, plagiarism and presentation skills. It explains the meaning and use of referencing and paraphrasing, and ways to avoid plagiarism.

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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY...................................................................................................................................4
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION
The current report will describe the concept of notetaking along with its related
importance. The report will outline the sources of information. Further this report will clear the
meaning and use of referencing and paraphrasing. Lastly it will cover plagiarism and
presentation skills.
MAIN BODY
Notetaking
The practice in which people record information that is available from varied sources or
mediums. Through notetaking the important points of the information are written down so that it
can be recalled when in need. The process of notetaking can also be done digitally with the use
of software. Notes are usually taken for verbal discussions or lectures. It is an important part of
one’s learning process. It stimulates students to learn, hold what they learn through regular
recall. The thinking regarding the learnt subject enhances, also the perspective to look at
learnings change (Morehead and et.al., 2019). Notetaking further helps in improving the focus to
the lectures as it involves active listening and participation. The benefits are not limited to
students, in fact people of various fields can implement notetaking and have experience of its
advantages. Furthermore, it enables reviewing of important and interesting key points of thing
that is being studied. There is one more term attached to this that helps a note taker to understand
the things or concepts with utmost clarity, note making. The practice of notetaking when done in
one’s own language is referred to as note making.

Sources of Information
Any person, thing and / or place that gives any kind of information or from which the
information arises is called information source or source of information. The sources of
information are classified under three sub heads that are primary, secondary and tertiary sources
of information. When an information is description of a first time event or evidence it is primary
information. Secondary information is the analysis, interpretation or restatement of primary
sources (Sarabi-Jamab and Araabi 2018). The abstraction, compilation and digestion of
secondary sources is called tertiary sources. Reliable sources of information are those that are
derived from dependable sources. This type of sources provides reasons, arguments based on
theories that supports the content of information. These are credible and trust worthy sources of
information. Examples of reliable sources of information are scholarly and magazine articles,
scholarly and professional articles and books, well established newspapers. Reliable sources are

accurate, continuously evolves, includes author with their credentials, and covers all the relevant
points. The information that comes from authors with absence of knowledge relating to the
concerned subject is regarded as unreliable source. These are non-accurate, non-credible and
non-trust worthy sources. Examples of unreliable sources to information includes Wikipedia,
personal websites, blogs, websites having political and biased motives for their creation etc.
Referencing and Paraphrasing
Referencing is defined as acknowledgement of works of other authors, writers used by an
individual in the research work. Referencing is needed to eliminate plagiarism through clearly
mentioning that the ideas are of some other person. It depicts one’s understanding in relation to
the topic, also it helps in supporting opinions, thoughts or ideas with evidences (Hu and et.al.,
2019). Reference is used when someone’s’ ideas available in their work is used. There are
various styles that are used in referencing out of which the most common one is Harvard Style to
reference. Example: Reference - Manzardo, A. and et.al., 2018. Definition and application of
activity portfolio and control/influence approaches in organizational life cycle
assessment. Journal of Cleaner Production. 184. pp.264-273. In text citation – (Manzardo and
et.al., 2018). Paraphrasing is defined as restating a text, work, paragraph in a complete new form
that gives the same meaning. It means repeating something that is said or written by someone by
using different words. Paraphrasing aims at making the written or spoken text in simple terms
and short format that makes it original meaning more clear.

Plagiarism
Copying some other persons work or ideas is called plagiarism. It is a serious offence.
Stealing someone’s work and claiming it as original, using someone’s work without giving
credits, literary theft, all comes under plagiarism. Further it includes converting some other
persons’ work as one’s own work. Copying others content and not giving them credits. Absence
of quotation marks where someone’s statements are quoted in the current work. Copying of
sentences with mere use of synonyms in place of originally used words. Presence of majority of
words or ideas in one’s work from someone else’s work is also plagiarism even after giving due
credits (Foltýnek, Meuschke and Gipp, 2019). Plagiarism can be avoided in most of the cases by
citing the sources of original work. Acknowledgment to borrowing someone’s work or ideas and
providing the readers with actual information source is sufficient for avoidance of plagiarism is
one’s work. When one uses any image, music or video that is not owned by that person in their
work without giving citation or seeking permission for actual creator it is also plagiarism. To
avoid plagiarism citation must be done properly.

Presentation Skills
The abilities that are required to be possessed by an individual in order to deliver a
presentation that compels, engages, provides information, educates, transforms, enlightens the
viewers are known as presentation skills. To begin with the factor of presentation skills is
enthusiasm and honesty. It means that the presenter must be interested with the topic and specific
to it (Ochoa and Dominguez, 2020). The enthusiasm of the presenter has positive impact over the
audience. Further it should be focused on the audience. Effectivity of the presentation lies in the
ability of presenter to deliver a presentation that focuses on audience rather than self. Lastly the
presenter should have ability to present complex topics by making them simple.
CONCLUSION
Based on the above report it has been concluded that notetaking is a useful practice in
learning process. The report has explained various sources of information. Referencing and
paraphrasing have been outlined in this report. Further the report has discussed the meaning of
plagiarism and ways to avoid it. Lastly presentation skills have been outlined.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Morehead, K. and et.al., 2019. Note-taking habits of 21st century college students: implications
for student learning, memory, and achievement. Memory. 27(6). pp.807-819.
Sarabi-Jamab, A. and Araabi, B. N., 2018. How to decide when the sources of evidence are
unreliable: A multi-criteria discounting approach in the Dempster–Shafer
theory. Information Sciences. 448. pp.233-248.
Hu, J. E. and et.al., 2019, July. Parabank: Monolingual bitext generation and sentential
paraphrasing via lexically-constrained neural machine translation. In Proceedings of the
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 33, No. 01, pp. 6521-6528).
Foltýnek, T., Meuschke, N. and Gipp, B., 2019. Academic plagiarism detection: a systematic
literature review. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). 52(6). pp.1-42.
Ochoa, X. and 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). pp.1615-1630.
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