Transcript Lesson 24 Essentials Video: Citation

NICOLE: And as I'm freewriting, I want to also include that you need to mark and document your sources as you're freewriting, because it will be hell—excuse my language—to go back after your freewriting and find all those sources again.

TIMOTHY: If I find it once and I go away from it, it's really hard to find again.

ANSEL: For me, I found it's best just to cite—as soon as I know I'm using a source, to immediately do the Works Cited for it. And that way, I always remember, this is the last name, and I'm always citing it. And then when I'm done with the paper, I don't have to go back and try to remember who wrote what.

HANNAH: And then once my research is done, I go and write my Works Cited page next, before I do any writing, because this allows me to go, OK, this is the quote I wanted to use. This is where it came from, and this is how I want to integrate it into my paper. So after I've done all of that, I go and write.

DEONTA: When it comes to citation, I normally try not to think about it too much, but the hardest part for me is in-text citation. When do you do them? How are you supposed to do them? And for the bibliography, I normally just use a citation website to make the list. So then it's just going back and making sure that everything—quotes or paraphrases—are correctly cited.

BILLY: Typically, when I'm writing my paper and I know what I'm saying comes from something that I read but I don't want to stop my process and open up the book and everything and flip to the right page, I just highlight that sentence, whether it's quotations or just a restatement of an idea. I highlight it, and then I put, in capital letters next to it, CITE. And then I go through and write more and do that over and over and over again.

MARC: Because a lot of the times, you just stick in quotes, it takes up a bunch of space and it's just someone else's writing. But still, we're paraphrasing. Obviously you still cite it. But you show that you know what the person's saying, but you can put it in your own words. And that shows you understand what you're talking about. And that's what he wanted to see. He wanted to see that we actually researched, we actually knew what we were talking about.

LINDSEY: So in APA, you do last name, first initial, and date. In MLA, you do the full first and last name, and the date goes at the end. But in scientific writing, it's important to know the date, because you can see how things have progressed. If you're looking at a study from 2001 and a study from 2011, the 2011 one is probably going to be more relevant and include stuff from the 2001 paper.