Citation Workshop
Team Names:
This workshop is meant to help you with the most common citation errors made when using electronic sources and give you a bit of experience with the difference between citation styles. You will want to work through the examples as a team at your table.
About Citation Styles
You write up your bibliographic information not only to help a teach check a source, but also because the primary purpose of any bibliography is as a reference for the readers of your work who might be interested in finding more information on a topic or in using one of your sources that caught their attention for their own work.
Citation styles differ, because different organizations (in this case the Modern Language Association, which deals mostly with literature and the American Psychological Association, which deals with psychology and related fields) emphasize different things. The MLA is interested in authors and titles because the date of publication doesn’t necessarily mean a novel is out of date. APA is more interested in currency of research, especially of the medical kind because it changes so quickly.
In text citation styles
MLA (author pg#) – e.g. (Williams 2) If you don’t ‘have the author, the default is to use a short form of the title. If you give either the author or the title in the text, you just need to put in the page number.
APA (author, date page) – e.g. (Williams, 2002, p. 2) Note, the page number is used only for a direct quote. A paraphrase doesn’t require the page number. If there is no date you write n.d. If you don’t ‘have the author, the default is to use a short form of the title. If you give either the author or the title in the text, you just need to put in the page number.
Long Quotes
MLA
Place quotations longer than four typed lines in a free-standing block of typewritten lines, and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, indented one inch from the left margin, and maintain double-spacing. Your parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark. When quoting verse, maintain original line breaks. (You should maintain double-spacing throughout your essay.)
APA
Place direct quotations longer than 40 words in a free-standing block of typewritten lines, and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, indented five spaces from the left margin. Type the entire quotation on the new margin, and indent the first line of any subsequent paragraph within the quotation five spaces from the new margin. Maintain double-spacing throughout. The parenthetical citation should come after closing punctuation mark.
Sources for practice:
For this use the link: If you scroll down the page, you’ll find links for MLA and APA. Warning: not everything here is listed there. Your team might have to use the books.
From Ebsco Host
Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments. Hocks, Mary E.; College Composition and Communication, v54 n4 p629-56 Jun 2003 (EJ669508)
*Audience Awareness;*Instructional Improvement;*World Wide Web;*Writing Instruction
Abstract: Illustrates key features of visualrhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. Considers how by looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visualrhetoric as a transformative process of design. (SG)
Retrieve Article - ODU has this in print.
MLA citation
APA citation
Rhetoric and Reality in the Process of Scientific Inquiry
Heather Brodie Graves
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 106-125.
Stable URL:
MLA citation
APA citation
Web Style Guide. Second edition. copy right 2002, Lynch and Horton.