Documenting
written sources is the habit of giving a kind of a ‘road map’ to the
information used in one’s writings that do not originate from him or her. This
road map, direct readers to the original article. Documentation of sources used
for writing is an integral part of the writing process itself. This is because,
academic writings all the times requires one to back up the ideas being
projected with evidences from the works of other authors with similar idea.
Documenting sources usually occurs in two places in the article: within the
article and at the tail end of article.
Writing
the sources within the paper is known as in-text documentation. This type of documentation is used when the
writer quotes or paraphrases an idea from the source article and align this
idea to his line of thought. The last
name of the author and the year of publication is usually written either at the
beginning or end of the sentence or quote. The page number from where a quote
is taken should be referenced or documented as well. This should be used only
when an author is quoted and not paraphrased. In-text referencing helps the
reader to know the standpoint of the writer concerning the idea of discuss.
The
other place where writers are obligated to document their sources is at the end
of the article. This is called the reference list. This list contains the full
names of all the authors whose works were used, title of the articles, year of
publication, page number and if it is a magazine, volume and issue number
should be included. There are different
formats of writing this list and each has its guidelines which must be followed
meticulously. For instance, it could appear numerically serial as in
alpha-numeric kind of referencing or it could appear in alphabetical order as
in APA referencing. The order in which this should appear depends on the
prevailing format of referencing in an institution or academic society. The
writer should normally find this out and align his referencing to the accepted
format. One point that is noteworthy while writing reference list is the fact
that all in-text citations must appear in the reference list.
One
may be tempted to ask,” why must we document all sources and at all times?’’
The answer is simple! Not only does it showcase to all readers the level of the
writer’s proficiency in writing and in researching, it also tells the readers
that the writer is honest, and therefore cannot be accused of plagiarism.
Friends,
to sum up, I will encourage us to utilize proper in-text and reference list
documentations in all our writings, while saying a big thank you to Dr.
Dettlaff for teaching me most of the information I put down here. cheers!
Thank you, Geraldine, for this great reflection and summary of what we've been learning in class. Hope everybody can keep this all in mind and utilize it appropriately in all of our written work. Have a great (and successful) rest of the semester!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Geraldine for sharing the bog with us. I think it is a good recovering about what we took in our class. I totally a agree with we have to document the sources that we will find because we should cite from whoever we took the information from. the reader should know where to find the source. if we did not cite maybe we will be in trouble for plagiarism so we should prevent ourselves to not have this mistake in our paper. thank you for giving me the chance to comment about your blog
ReplyDeleteGood Job Geraldine. I totally agree with you, Dr Dettlaff has already taught what we need to know about documenting written sources. So, this was probably like a revision or your understanding from what you got from the lecture. Yes, a well written documented source has to have a reference list even though the text was already written in the paper i.e. in-text documentation. I totally agree with you, while writing a reference list for a paper, all in-text citations must appear in the reference list. Thank you for your insights.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Geraldine for sharing your thought. This information is very important since we have a project. We must document sources in order to avoid problems and plagiarism. Also documenting the sources is important to protect the rights of others and their work it is not right to attribute someone else's work to you simply. Thank you again.
ReplyDeleteVery nice thought, thank you Geraldine for sharing that, and I like it because that help us to protect our papers when we cite all the sources in our essays. However, Source work (Academic Writing from Source) class was very helpful and important to know the all materials from this class. Thank you very much.
ReplyDeleteThank you for Sharing Geraldine. When I think about document sources, I often step into the authors shoes. If I spent weeks writing a paper, just to have someone claim the information as my own, I would be very upset. I think that is why in the US we have such strict laws on plagiarism and why it is so important to cite our sources.
ReplyDelete