mountainboo
If you are really serious about referencing (sometimes called 'citation' in the text), then follow these simple rules. Paraphrasing and summarising are some of the essential ways to avoid charges of plagiarism.
Read the paragraph, make sure you understand it and and make notes. .
Close the book
Rewrite using your notes, as this means you will not be influenced by the words you have read or the structure of the sentences. Changing a few words is not enough.
Take what you have written and check again to make sure that you have understood/done it correctly.Then put the author's family name, followed by a comma, followed by the year, all in brackets. You might want to include the page number.
Example (Smith, 2009, p 342)
In your referencong/biblography list at the end, you need the following 6 pieces of basic information for a book:
Author's family name
Author's initial(s)
Year (in brackets),
Title of the book (underlined or in italics)
Place of publication
Publisher
You should be able to find this information on the page behind the title page (not the cover) of a book.
This is the Harvard system. Does this help?
If you want, I can give you some website addresses to help you.