Documentation—WHAT, WHERE, AND HOW.

These are the normal documentation requirements for essays that draw upon sources. They will help you to avoid plagiarism. (This sheet is no substitute, however, for a documentation style guide.) In most essays that use sources, you need something corresponding to I, II, and III, below.

I. Works Cited Works Consulted Bibliography References (Alphabetized by last name, where available) Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: Norton, 1996.

IIA. Parenthetical in-text citations MLA style: (Lasch 200) APA style: (Lasch, 1984) (These are placed at the point in your text when you have borrowed material. They do not always look like the examples above: the author may be left out of the parentheses if the author has already been mentioned in the same or the immediately previous sentence. When the source is only one page long, no page number is necessary in MLA guidelines. When there is more than one source in your bibliography by the same author, MLA guidelines require a brief abbreviated title right there in the parenthetical citation.)

IIB. Attribution phrases According to Christopher Lasch, author of The Revolt of the Elites, … Christopher Lasch, professor of history at the University of Rochester, says that … ON SECOND OR SUBSEQUENT REFERENCE: Lasch also says that … … , he said.

III. Quotation marks Necessary for those places in your essay in which you use approximately seven consecutive words or more from a source. Every word inside quotation marks should be exact, unless an adjustment is made in the interest of grammatical coherence with your own writing; in cases where adjustments are made, use brackets [ ].

Notes:

· Changing the words of the original does not release you from the obligation of citing a source.

· Using the word “says” does not tell the reader that you are quoting. Only quotation marks tell readers that you are borrowing the exact language.

· Many teachers and some academic disciplines only want IIA or IIB. IIA is the social science and academic way to cite; IIB is the journalist’s method. There are advantages of using both, since only IIA provides page numbers or dates, and only IIB provides first name and credentials. Introducing borrowed material with “According to Christopher Lasch,” and finishing with (200) is a way of indicating where it begins and ends.

· Usually, give credit sentence-by-sentence if you continue to draw from the source. This is very common practice, and it will not seem so obtrusive once you get used to it. (As writers use longer sentences and as they learn to put their attribution phrases at the ends rather than the beginnings of sentences, the references become more graceful.)

· Double citations, sources within sources, are very common. Fit in both the name of your source and the name of the true owner of the idea; you can look up the most graceful ways to do this. Remember that parenthetical citations must work in conjunction with your Works Cited page.

· Learning what information falls into the category of “common domain” will be a long process. In the meantime, you probably have to find the information (or statistic or definition) in a second source before you can be sure that it is commonly owned.