“Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”

It is not enough to simply find good sources: you also need to know what to do with them.  You can’t just copy and paste entire documents into your own document.  Instead, you have to incorporate only the most relevant information from each source, and this must be done as efficiently as possible and in a way that complements your own content, other sources, and the overall narrative.  To this point, it is also often not enough to include individual sources apropos of nothing else.  Part of what you bring (or should bring) as a technical writer is the ability to synthesize many different sources and bits of information into larger pictures (not to mention structuring these larger ideas), and this can come either through direct quotation, paraphrasing, or a combination of the two, all of which must adhere to the conventions for these practices (including works cited pages).  We contended with several different motivations behind our use and synthesis of sources.  For the technical description I used sources mainly to educate myself on the slide rule in order to then educate the audience in essentially every section.  For the lab report I used sources to piece together the basis behind and content of my “experiment” and to support my interpretations.  For our proposal, research was necessary to find a problem to be solved, to offer specifics on this problem, to support our ideas on how to fix this problem, and to provide background on these solutions and their implementation.  One way in which we integrated and synthesized our sources was in using multiple data points towards a specific message (figure 27).  Research was also necessary in every case for nailing down specific audiences.  

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