No matter what sources you consult, it's important to understand what you're actually doing with sources when you use them to write a paper, and, for that matter, why writing papers is such a significant component of your college education. While there may be occasions when you are asked to provide a summary of other people's ideas, most of your writing assignments at Harvard will ask you to answer a question or series of questions—either posed by you or posed for you by your instructor. The answer to a question will generally come in the form of an argument in which you make a claim, marshal evidence to support it, analyze that evidence, and cogently explain to your readers why you have taken this position. The strongest arguments in any field are those that don't simply repeat what has already been said, but rather survey the relevant data, arguments, or documents—i.e., the sources—and, taking those sources into account, offer an original response to the question.
When you examine and consider sources as you seek to answer a research question, you are engaging with the work of scholars in your field and the work that they have written about. By doing so, you are joining the ongoing conversation about ideas that your professors and TFs have introduced you to in lecture and seminar, and that they themselves engage in as they conduct their own research and do their own writing. If you think of your work as playing a part in this larger conversation, it becomes easier to understand what you are doing with sources in your own writing: you are responding to and building on the work that has come before your own. As you consult sources, you should always be asking yourself questions about what a source adds to your understanding of a topic and how it might be helpful to you as you write your own paper. For example, a source might help you answer the question you've raised, or it might raise another question for you that suggests a path for further research. A source might influence your thinking about a particular topic or question, but it might also contradict your own thinking, which would require you to do more research to figure out how to understand this conflicting point of view.
The question you are trying to answer will determine the types of sources you consider within a specific field, as will the scope of the paper you're writing. For example, if you are writing a close reading paper about Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, you will likely be expected to focus only on the play itself. In this case, the play is your source. On the other hand, if you wanted to investigate how the social climate of Victorian England influenced the way Shakespeare's comedies were produced in that era, your sources might also include theater reviews from London newspapers of the time, as well as letters or diary entries written by people who saw productions of the plays. If you were writing a literature review paper for a sociology course about racial bias in education, your sources would likely include journal articles that report studies on this topic. On the other hand, if you were writing a senior thesis about racial bias in education, you would consider those same articles, but you would also likely produce your own raw data through interviews or other studies.
Just as the ideas you develop in a paper will be shaped by your response to the sources you consider, the ideas presented by the scholars you read in your courses are built on their responses to previous knowledge, i.e., the sources they consulted. This is important to keep in mind as you begin the process of writing papers and as you think about what it means to make an original claim. It's also important to remember that your plans for a paper can—and should—be shaped by what you encounter in a source. You may start out with one assumption and then end up shifting gears when you read something that convincingly challenges that assumption. Or you may find that a source raises a question that prompts you to revisit your original assumption.
For more information on the ways that sources function in a paper, and for advice about how to make them work most effectively in your own paper, consult the section of this guide on integrating sources.