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The Chicago Manual of Style is used in professional writing and some social sciences. Historians and those submitting articles to British or Australian journals should pay close attention to how the Chicago Manual of Style suggests using footnotes.

The Modern Language Association is the primary style manual for our good friends in the Language Arts. Very similar to the APA, so be careful!

The APA manual is organized in two ways: in text citations and the references page. The best place to start looking for answers to your questions is the example article near the end of the book. Also, follow the links on the side of the APA Style web page to APA Style tips. You will find up to date tips on electronic references and other odd citations.

The University of Washington Library page is a great resource. The citation guides are fantastic, and the citation tools are a big help. The grammar and usage handouts offer general writing tips too. Remember that the UW library can put works into your preferred citation style.

The College of Education Writing Center page has a number of tools that are designed to help academic writers. The revision tool is a charting tool that will help writers keep track of their citations--avoiding redundancy and bolstering claims.

Buy APA: The Easy Way with the APA manual on Amazon and get a deal. Consider buying a used manual too!

We're doing this because we owe our readers and our sources respect!

Begin with a seminal paper, and establish lines of scholarship from that paper.

Quoting:

When you quote directly form a source, you will need to include the author, the year the work was published, and the page number. Direct quotations are good when you can't say it any better yourself. Be aware that you need to provide a context for a quote--introduce your quote. Give your reader information about why you are quoting an author. And don't leave your reader hanging!

Ereaux (1998) examines the impact of technological development on one tribal college, Salish Kootenai College, in greater detail.  In his examination, Ereaux points out some of the exacerbating effects of rapid, enthusiastic technology development on cultures that value thoughtful and deliberate change.  Ereaux states, "Current modern technology demands high content/low context, monochromic structures.  Such systems are not necessarily compatible with low content/high context, polychromatic Native American cultures" (p. 98).   Interestingly, Ereaux also reveals that Native Americans may not feel extremely concerned about the impact technology may have on their cultures. 

Here is an example of a quote spliced into text:

Because the power of examination as reinforcement was very strong, and teachers taught the subjects according to "a very large number of very small steps" (Skinner, 1954, p. 94), teachers could teach 40 students very efficiently with low costs, and companies enjoyed a high-quality, homogeneous workforce.

Paraphrasing:

Here is a conceptual citation where the author has cited other authors ideas:

In the 1980s and 1990s, many researchers focused on the dynamic and systemic features of trust, assessing its organizational or relational aspects (Lewis & Weigert, 1985; Mayer & Davis, 1999). In this vein, Lewis and Weigert argued that trust was social and normative rather than individual, and trust required prior social relations for its formation.

Summarizing:

Good summaries, the bedrock of analytical work, include the following:

1. context of research and main research questions

2. findings/conclusions/implications

3. notes on method

Stein, Engle, Hughes, and Smith (2007) have built upon the previously described CGI (Cognitively Guided Instruction) model of strategy reporting to present the "5 Practices of Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussion." Designed to aide teachers in orchestrating the wide array of student strategies to get at deeper understanding of key mathematical ideas, they offer 5 Practices (anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and connecting) to describe what manageable, strategic, and mathematically rich strategy reporting can look like and sound like. The researchers draw on a wide array of literature to make these recommendations while stipulating that more work needs to be done.

Why do we cite?

1. tell readers where we got our information

2. join the academic conversation

3. offer an audit--gain credibility

Notice the last name, fist initial format. The year of publication after the author's name allows readers to discern between works when the same author is cited more than once. Date retrieved is an important piece of an electronic citation, because electronic sources are dynamic--they change. Including the date allows readers to track down sources.

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3. What did we miss?

4. Need to know more? Make an appointment!

bnorris@u.washington.edu

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421 B Miller