Sources in College vs High School

Writing using sources is very important in both high school and college, but misconceptions and differences exist between the schooling levels. One big difference between college and high school writing is the formatting of sources. In high school, I only used MLA formatting, but in college, I have to use all different types of citing depending on the class.

Additionally, in high school I never realized that there are different types of citing and I thought that everyone used the same citing style. At college I realized that everyone uses different citing styles, from English to History and Political Science.

Another difference that I found from high school to college is the use of annotations in a paper. In high school, all of my papers focus on one or two sources, and my teacher told us to put the citations at the ends of paragraphs or at the end of multiple sentences from the sources. In college this will not, work because you are using lots more than two sources and that is not correct citing.

Finally, another thing that I learned in college writing is that when you are paraphrasing authors writing you must significantly change the wording and truly makes the authors words into your own, because if you just change a few words you are really plagiarizing that authors work. In college, you must learn to cite in different citation formats for different classes, use annotations correctly in your paper, and learn how to paraphrase authors’ words correctly.