Good Advice on Picking up Pics for Descriptive Essays

When you are writing a descriptive essay, you will likely need to add some pictures. It helps enhance the paper and helps create a better looking final product. The main problem that students face when choosing a picture or two to include in their descriptive essay is to find the citation information for it. It is a fact that you have to give credit to the individual that created the visual or took the picture for their efforts if you are using it for your own piece of work. You knew that you had to site direct quotes, but pictures, really?

When you add a picture to your essay and you don’t cite the creator, it looks like your work and this is the same type of plagiarism is stealing other people’s words. You have to make sure that you site the source. Here are some tips that can help you add some pictures to your piece of work without getting in trouble for plagiarizing.

  1. Cite your picture
  2. You have to include the citation information into your paper. You can create a caption that includes the proper citation information for the picture. If you are using a writing format like MLA or APA, you would find out how to cite the image using these resources.

  3. Clip Art
  4. If you read the copyright information for your word processor, than you can learn whether or not you will have to cite it. Some of the most popular word processing programs will allow you to use the images for projects and documents. That means that they do not need to be cited unless you intend to sell or distribute the images by themselves. If you are using them to enhance your homework paper, than it is not an issue.

  5. Choosing an image
  6. Since you don’t have to worry about citing a clip art image, it would be best to try and use this option first if you can find something that will work for you. When you are looking for an image, you would want to use the search option and enter some keywords until you find an image that portrays what you are looking for. Be sure to minimize the images because too many images creates a cluttered piece of work.

Images can be used to enhance your essay, however, they have to be handled properly. If the image belongs to someone, it has to be cited so that credit is giving to them for their work.

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