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Documenting Your Sources with In-Text citations |
A Review |
Composition 1 & 2 – Cherie Dargan
Summer 2001
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Documenting Your Sources with In-Text citations |
A Review |
What does a teacher mean when he or she says, "Cite your source!" It means to identify the origins of a quote (direct or indirect) or other material used from your sources. Doing research is hard work, but it is worth doing correctly. Doing a sloppy job can result in plagiarism (stealing someone else’s ideas, words, or style of writing/speaking) and get you into a great deal of trouble.
You can think of yourself as a detective when you are gathering research; you are looking for evidence of some sort--a pattern of ideas that supports your own ideas. Others who read your work may want to do more in-depth exploration of your sources. If you do not say where a specific fact, quote, scenario, case study, statistic, or anecdote comes from, your reader will not be able to do so. Think of documenting sources as leaving a paper trail.
Please remember that WHENEVER you use ideas, words, or concepts that are not your own ideas you must give credit to the source. Your textbooks give guidelines for citing direct quotes, summaries, and paraphrases from a variety of types of sources--both print and web-based.
IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO SIMPLY LIST SOURCES AT THE END OF THE DOCUMENT! Where did you use each source? If I, as the reader, want to follow up on your paper how do I know where to look?
The documents at the end of the paper are generally referred to as your bibliography; however, this is an older term. We use two basic styles of documentation: the MLA and the APA.
MLA -- Modern Language Association -- a good style to use for English papers. Students like it because it seems "easy" to learn. The end document is called the Works Cited page. Here are some examples of simple MLA citations.
What is a citation? It is the place where you identify your source, using parentheses. The key pieces of information for an MLA citation are the author’s last name and the page number. (Post 23). Here are some examples.
1. Author not named: Brown is author.
As Dr. Cherie Post stated recently in an article in Modern Teachers Today, "it is important to buy red pens by the ten pack!" (Brown 23).
2. Author named: Post is author.
As Dr. Cherie Post stated recently in an article in Modern Teachers Today, "it is important to buy red pens by the ten pack!" (23)
More Tips and Reminders:
 | Don’t fill your paper with quote after quote; paraphrase (put it into your own words) or summarize. |
| If you do have a long quote--that is, a quote that takes more than four lines--use the long quote format. You just indent ten spaces from left only; you do not need to use quote marks, and you still need to place the citation at the end of the quote. |
| If you have a long quote, introduce it. In fact, any quote should be incorporated into your paper. I think it is best to directly introduce each source the first time you use it. This can help you give credibility to internet sources, since you often cannot get a personal author or page number; however, you can get an accurate URL (website address). |
See my examples above for how I introduce sources.
According to....
As......said
APA -- American Psychological Association -- a good style to use for Psychology and Sociology papers. You may hear others refer to it as the author/year style because the date of publication is always placed after the author’s last name in parentheses. The end document is called the References page.
Three differences between MLA and APA:
1. added commas
2. added date (year of publication) placed after author’s last name
3. added page (p for one page; pp for more than one page)
Again, here are some examples of APA in-text citations.
1. Author not named; Brown is author.
As Dr. Cherie Post stated recently in an article in Modern Teachers Today, "it is important to buy red pens by the ten pack!" (Brown, 1997, p. 23).
2. Author named; Brown is author.
As Brown (1997) quotes Post recently in an article in Modern Teachers Today, "it is important to buy red pens by the ten pack!" (p. 23)
So, to conclude, you MUST use internal documentation, or in-text citations, in your documented paper. This is why I need to see the good draft at the conference: if you have missed any, I can help you find and fix them.
Created by Cherie Post Dargan
August 3, 2001
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