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Documentation:
Cite Your Sources |
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DOCUMENTATION
. . .CITE YOUR SOURCES. . .
When you "cite your sources," you provide documentation naming the source of your information--who said or wrote what and where you found it, even to the exact page on which you found information that you borrow. The term "document your sources" is equivalent to the term "cite your sources": name your source, and give enough information about your source that your own reader can retrieve the text that you used (or an duplicate copy of such a text) and re-read what you read, or go back to an interview subject and re-interview her or him. Ideally, documentation includes the following components:
- attribution (where you give the credentials of the author you are citing along with her or his name)
- citation (where you tell where you found the information you are using)--an in-text citation is given in parenthesis AFTER the information cited.
- a works-cited list (where you give the full facts of the resource to which the in-text citation alludes)
Any information you borrow must be cited, whether it's in the form of a quote, a paraphrase, a summary, or even a factual assertion, if the matter is arcane or in some dispute. Top of page
Provide attribution.
Whenever you read responsible writing, you will note that when someone is quoted, the
person's name and title or relevant affiliation is also provided. When you cite your
source, it's a good idea to provide attribution in the text of your writing, rather than
to bury the source information in a parenthetical citation or in a works-cited list.
In other words, attribute the quotation, the paraphrase, or the summary to whoever you
borrowed it from originally in your research--and weave this information into the body of
your writing.
When you tell who said what, and in what context, you allow your reader to better understand and evaluate the information you are communicating. Whenever you help your reader to understand and evaluate your information, your demonstrate excellence in scholarship and researched writing.
Here are some examples where the words of attribution (name and credentials or title of the person cited, context of original quotation) are set in boldface below. The first examples of attribution come from articles about the 1999 Balkan conflict.
The first article comes from the New York Times, 10 June 1998 (online at <http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/061098kosovo-us-assess.html>), accessed 25 April 1999. The article has no page number, but the URL will provide the resource needed (a "find in page" function will allow your reader to go directly to this part of the article):
In his article, "Has the West Learned From Mistakes in Bosnia?, " Stephen Erlanger, correspondent for the New York Times, examines the importance of Kosovo to the Serbs: "Independence for Kosovo is unthinkable to Milosevic and the Serbs, given the centrality of the province to Serbian history, religion and culture, said Warren Zimmermann, the American ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1992. "While Bosnia was an adventure for Milosevic and the world recognized its independence," Zimmermann said, "it's much harder for Milosevic to make concessions in Kosovo, which is recognized as part of Yugoslavia.". . . To Carl Bildt, once the European Union's senior representative in Bosnia, the lack of decisive action by the West is "deja vu in Kosovo." To Marshall Freeman Harris, a former State Department official who quit over American inaction in Bosnia, "the West is screwing it up again." While Kosovo presents different problems, Harris said, "it's the similarities that count -- you have the same protagonist, Milosevic, and the same goal, which is to drive out non-Serbs and kill them if necessary."
The second article, also accessed online 25 April 1999 and also from the New York Times article--"A Rich Literature Traces the Roots of Balkan Conflict," copyrighted 1998 concerns the literature providing a background for understanding the conflict (accessed online at <http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/kosovo/article24.html>) :
Roger Cohen, a New York Times correspondent based in Berlin, who covered the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 and wrote Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo (Random House, 1998)--provides several reading suggestions for those who wish to understand the conflict between the Serbs and Albanians today. After suggesting several nonfiction political and historical works, Cohen concludes that "fiction may, in the end, provide deeper clues to the region's shifting tides. The novels of Ivo Andric, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, capture the light and dark of Bosnia. His Bosnian Chronicle (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963) and The Bridge on the Drina (University of Chicago Press, 1977) illuminate the subtle truths of the Balkans with a relentless precision."
Or take this part of Tracy Wilkinson's "Drama of Balkans Is Long, Turbulent, and Cruel," an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition of 25 April 1999. Wilkinson demonstrates the cyclical nature of the violence--Serbs repressing Albanians who then turn to terrorism, thus leading to more oppression on the part of the Serbs against them, and more armed rebellion, and so forth:
As the late dissident Yugoslav writer and politician Milovan Djilas once told an interviewer: "If there had been no battle at Kosovo, the Serbs would have invented it for its suffering and heroism." . . .
Leon Trotsky, just a few years before he helped Lenin launch the Bolshevik Revolution, was Pravda's correspondent covering the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars.
"The horrors actually began as soon as we crossed into Kosovo," Trotsky wrote in one dispatch. "Entire Albanian villages had been turned into pillars of fire, dwellings, possessions accumulated by fathers and grandfaterhs were going up in flames, the picture was repeated the whole way to Skopje. There the Serbs broke into Turkish and Albanian houses and performed the same task in every case: plundering and killing."
The Balkan Wars ended with Serbia--soon to be part of a kingdom that later became Yugoslavia--in control of Kosovo, and with the cration of an independent Albanian state to the southwest. (S6)
Take another example, this one because it's April--and April is Poetry Month in the United States. Consider the attribution provided in this article from the Sunday, 25 April 1999 edition of the Los Angeles Times, entitled "Poets Unleash Power of Words"; the poet has already been introduced earlier as W. S. Merwin and the article reports on his reading at a panel called "Poetry: The Music of Language":
Guided by moderator James Ragan, four of the nation's most noted poets talked about their art, read some of their work and answered questions. "For me, a poem always begins with hearing soething. . . not with thinking about it," said Merwin, who won the 1971 Pulitzer in poetry. "I try to find the other sounds that belong with it." (Jean Merl et al, B1)
Increase your awareness of this practice of providing
attribution when you read newspapers and magazines and when you listen to television or
live "experts" purporting to tell you what is true about the world out there and
who said what about what and to whom. You'll discover that the best, most credible
resources are those which provide clear and relevant attribution.
For more information about and examples of incorporating quotations, see the next Information Competency Tutorial on Using Sources Responsibly.
Use in-text
citation. In your paper, whenever you use someone else's words or ideas (in quoted,
paraphrased, or summary form), you need to provide an in-text citation to show the exact
location of the information you borrowed. The in-text citation--which tells author
and page number usually--is set into parentheses after the quotation, paraphrase, or
summary. The examples above provide in-text citations.
The example below comes from a paper on the value of the in-person or face-to-face encounter in a world increasingly mediated by technological separators which function to help us communicate with or learn from one another (television, radio, telephone, Internet):
There is no question that human presence cannot be replicated in cyberspace or via sound or microwave. There is something about being face to face which permits a communication impossible otherwise. This something is what Walter Ong--scholar of language and orality, and University Professor of Humanities & Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at St. Louis University, MO. in his later years of work--calls "primary orality." In his classic 1982 text, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong makes the following clarification:
Primary orality fosters personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates. Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. A teacher speaking to a class which he [or she] feels and which feels itself as a close-knit group, finds that if the class is asked to pick up its textbooks and read a given passage, the unity of the group vanishes as each person enters into his or her private lifeworld. (69)
I can imagine someone telling the Navajo Creation Story, bit by bit, over days or weeks, to his or her friends and family as a way of gathering them together in the web of the storytelling. They are there together to hear and participate in the telling, maybe even to add new content that brings the story alive. It's the only way they can get this knowledge, through a communal storytelling event, in real time and place, where they hear the story and at the same time sense and value each other's full physical presence. While most, probably all, employees will have some degree of literacy--it might be possible to create more of a sense of community if we supplemented, or even replaced, our reading assignments (reports, documentation, research, etc.) with storytelling sessions. Would it be wise to hire a storyteller to help build community? Is it possible to teach orality to literates?
Note that the in-text citation consists of the introduction of the quoted matter (providing attribution) and the page number in parentheses after the quotation. To get the full citation, we'd go to the Works Cited Listing at the end of the paper, look down to the O's to find "Ong"--and we'll see this full citation (using MLA format):
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Top of page
Create a Works-Cited List.
At the end of your paper, you create an alphabetized listing of the works that you
referred to ("cited") in your paper. A "works-cited" listing
uses the bibliographic format required in the assignment (e.g., MLA or APA). An
"alphabetized" list means that the sources are organized alphabetically by the
last name of the authors. A "Works Consulted" page includes references to
sources not used in the paper, but consulted in the process of research.
For more information, go to the style guides below under Documentation, or see A Guide for Writing Research Papers. Top of page
Use the appropriate
documentation style. Generally, if your paper is written for the arts and
humanities, you will use MLA style. If the paper is written for the behavioral,
natural, or social sciences, you will use APA style. Your guide or professor will
identify the style you should use in your paper. For a short and easy general guide
to both styles, consult the MiraCosta College
Library Citation Guides.
- MLA Style. The best way to learn the "Modern Language Association" guidelines is to consult a text which publishes their guidelines or go directly to their Official MLA Website, where you can find several examples of the most commonly cited sources. The Purdue University Online Writing Lab provides an easy-to-use guide to MLA Format. (See Columbia Guide to Online Style.)
- APA Style. The "American Psychology Association" Webpage on Internet Citations can help you when you are using APA style to cite Websites. Top of page
Prepare an annotated bibliography when appropriate. An
annotated bibliography is a listing of sources cited or consulted, plus a description and
evaluation of those sources. Each source is listed using the documentation style that is
called for in the assignment. The listings of an annotated bibliography may be
arranged alphabetically by author of sources or chronologically by date of publication;
alternatively, the works in an annotated bibliography may be organized generically by
types of references and then listed alphabetically by author within each genre.
After the bibliographical citations (using the correct documentation style), the annotations ("notes added to") of a generic annotated bibliography may be written in complete sentences or in fragments. The University of Illinois Research Website provides some good information about generic annotated bibliographies.
N. B., Your instructor may ask you to provide more or less information than you find in the generic annotated bibliography. Follow the guidelines established by your professor. Top of page
Gloria
Floren, Letters Department, MiraCosta College, One Barnard Drive, Oceanside, California
92056. U.S.A. |
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