 Parenthetical notes are a VERY
important aspect of your term
paper, because they prevent
you from plagiarizing your
paper. The following
information will help you to
use parenthetical notes in your
paper with ease.
 A direct QUOTATION (using
quotation marks of course)
 A PARAPHRASE in which you
convey the author’s words, IDEAS,
and opinions and RESTATING them
in a more SIMPLE way
 A SUMMARY of a larger chunk of
INFORMATION in your own words
Your OPINION; for example:
Today’s video games are
extremely violent compared
to those released in the past.
 COMMON KNOWLEDGE facts and
information:
 The rule of thumb is that a fact is considered
common knowledge if the exact same fact is
found in at least THREE or more sources.
Facts like dates (like album/movie releases)
and undisputed facts are considered
common knowledge
 If you are UNSURE if your fact is common
knowledge, be sure to ASK to determine
whether or not you need a parenthetical note
with that fact.
 The author’s LAST name (or
name of a COMPANY or
organization if they are taking
CREDIT for compiling the
information)
 YEAR the information was
PUBLISHED
 Page NUMBER (if necessary, like for
books and other print sources)
 If you have an EDITOR instead of an
author, use the editor’s last name
 Basically, you need to use whatever
piece of information comes first in
your reference page entry; this helps to
easily identify where your information
came from when anyone looks at your
reference page and compares them to
your parenthetical notes
 You can use the TITLE of the article
instead; this will happen frequently
with WEB SITES
 You could also use a bit of the WEB
ADDRESS (stop after .com, .org,
.gov, etc. as long as you can tell the
website apart from others that are
used in your paper)
 At the very END of the quote,
paraphrase, or summary from one
of your sources
 Parenthetical notes appear right
BEFORE the PERIOD (or other end
punctuation) for the sentence the
quote, paraphrase, or summary
appears
 Remember: You must include at
least FOUR parenthetical notes
in your paper! They should NOT
be from the same source! You
should use at least ONE
parenthetical note from each of
your sources.
Here is a “quote from
a book for your term
paper”(Smith, 2003,
p. 27).