What is the "one sentence per paragraph rule" for research reports?
One of the problems that students, parents, and teacher struggle with is plagiarism. I think it's kind of epidemic, especially with the internet it's really easy for kids to cut and paste and move things over. At college nowadays, professors are increasingly having students turn in their work through a website that actually checks how much of the work can be found on the internet and I know a number of high schools around here are doing the same thing.So, it's getting to be one of those things that we really want to teach kids, morally but also practically, how they can use information and not plagiarize it .What we work with is a "one sentence per paragraph" rule. Basically we ask kids to read through a paragraph in their source material, whether it's an internet page, a book, or an encyclopedia, and then give a one sentence summary and that's the summary that goes into their notes. It forces them to condense the information; it forces them to understand the information and it forces them to take a good hunk of information and put it into their own words. So, if you're really struggling with your child, and they really just want to copy things word for word - some of them won't do the outlines, won't do the clusters. They get really frustrated; they just want to write it.That's one thing you can say, "Alright, you're going to summarize one paragraph - one sentence for each paragraph that you read. "It's a little more of a direct writing process. It's not your ideal writing process, but at least you make sure that they understand what they're doing, that it's in their own words, and that they're not plagiarizing anything.
