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ENGL 1007 Course Guide

First-Year Writing at UConn

Why Cite?

Citation isn't simply a formatting requirement -- your citations accomplish a lot in your compositions. According to the above video from UNC's Writing Center, the purposes of citation include offering "context, intellectual credibility, resources to investigate, and acknowledgement of other writers." Failing to offer these when your readers need them can potentially cause problems.

Part of the challenge is that citation is handled differently in different contexts. In everyday life, a doctor providing medical information and a journalist providing a quotation present this information differently due to the expectations of the audience and the conventions of the communication context. This is true within forms of academic writing, as well. For example, many pieces of scholarship in English literature use MLA style citations and many in psychology use APA (though there are always exceptions).

In ENGL 1007 (and across your academic career), how you cite sources will change depending on the writing context or rhetorical situation. Be sure to review your assignment guidelines carefully and ask your instructor about these expectations.

Formatting Citations

Citation styles can seem like an endless list of arbitrary rules. While they certainly take some getting used to, there is a logic to them. After all, their purpose is to present information in a relatively standard way so that you can understand what is being communicated (even though it doesn't seem that way at first!).

One thing to keep in mind is that when we refer to "citation" in academic writing, we're often discussing a whole system of different elements rather than just one thing. In a piece of writing, there is "in-text citation" (often either in parentheses or noted by a footnote/endnote) and then a corresponding reference list entry. The reason for both is simply that placing the full reference list citation would take up a lot of space and distract readers. You can find an example of this presented here, though we should caution that there are formatting differences across styles.

To further complicate matters, citations in non-academic writing are often radically different. Maybe you've wondered why you never encounter MLA or APA style citations while reading a news article -- journalists use different conventions, though providing an indication of where information is coming from is critically important in this context too. The same goes for a podcast -- sometimes a host may just verbally explain where they got a piece of data, or perhaps they provide written citations in show notes. It is often a judgment call -- how will readers get what they need to know?

Below are links to resources that provide further detail for building citations that follow certain conventions. Citation generation tools (whether software or web-based) can be helpful, but remember that their citations must always be verified for accuracy -- such tools often can't parse the needed information.

Final Advice

When writing for a class, it is good practice to always ask your instructor about any questions or concerns with citation practices. While many aspects of citational expectations are relatively standardized, it is always somewhat interpretive and based upon judgments -- your instructor may have particular guidelines or expectations to follow.