Skimming the Surface

Seeing as how turnitin.com was HUGE during high school, I never did exact copying. Out of the four categories, I was probably mostly a paraphraser, however I'm sure that towards the end of my papers my understanding of my sources started to lean more towards patchwriting solely based on the fact that I'd just get tired and could not think of anything too original. It really depended a lot on what I was writing about. If I'm more interested in what I'm writing about, I'm probably going to look more deeply into the sources and integrate what they are saying into my paper in a way that's better than just copy/pasting a quote and describing what it says. Over the years I've probably become less of a summarizer and more of a paraphraser/patchwriter. It's not something I'm too stoked about, but I feel like as the stakes get higher and higher my wanting to incorporate the texts becomes less and less because I'm more worried about what I'm going to say which obviously is going to be the bulk of the paper so I end up just throwing a couple quotes in there and calling those my citations. I'd really like to be able to get back into the "summarizing" style of writing, but it probably will depend on what I'm writing about. I guess I could try to find a personal connection with what I'm writing, but I'm not sure how successful of a tactic that could be because I'm sure that there are certain essay topics that I'll be able to find zero common ground with. I'm sure that as time goes on, however, that I'll be able to find different ways to be able to focus as much on the citations as I do on my own writing.