by Zahra Khalid
THE SECRET BEHIND CITATIONS
One terribly important yet thoroughly mysterious thing that we are asked to do in college is to “cite our sources properly.” We are told that if we don’t do this, we may be accused of plagiarism, usually along with a litany of actions that will be taken against us of we are found out. Because of this, getting citations wrong feels scary. This sucks because citations already feel cryptic, and the anxiety of getting them right can muddle our brains even more. Citations look like hieroglyphs to some of us, so the idea that we are supposed to do them at all, let alone do them “right,” can make us want to run in the opposite direction.
But here’s a secret: citations have a formula. In this they are kind of like math equations. Once we learn their format and sequence, we can do them just as easily as sophisticated “writers” who crank out fifty citations without blinking can.
As with any formula, it helps to know why we need citations, before we get into how to do them. Knowing why we need them can help us feel less intimidated by the how. Any piece of argumentative or research-based writing—the kind we are expected to do in a college class—is essentially a conversation we have with others who have written about the topic that we are writing about. That’s what differentiates this kind of writing from other kinds, such as creative or explorative writing. To make it clear to our readers who we are conversing with, i.e., how we are learning from them, adding to what they said, or disagreeing with them, we need to “cite” them so our readers can know who we are conversing with, and be able to differentiate who said what in our conversation (you or those you are speaking to). Citations are helpful signposts for the who-said-what in your conversation, so that your readers can more clearly follow what you are saying, and how it relates to what others have already said.
THE BASICS
So how do we write citations “properly”? There are two places citations appear in our writing. The first is in our writing itself. This is called “in-line” citations (or in-text citations), which literally means, the citations appear within the lines of our writing (inside our text). So if you use an idea or a quotation from someone, you add a citation right after that in your writing. This is by necessity short: you put down the author’s last name and the date their text was published. Then you move on to your next sentence. Including only the writer’s surname rather than their full name is a conventional scholarly shorthand. The reason to include the date is that oftentimes, a writer will have written more than one piece of writing, and years are a handy way of differentiating between different writings by the same author. In general, you don’t want to make your sentence look clunkier than it needs to be, so you provide the most essential information, and move on.
For example, let’s say you want to bring in one of Francine Prose’s main ideas from her book Reading like a Writer, that was published in 2007. You could do it like this:
Relearning the habit of reading slowly can help us discover the many layers of meaning that often exist in good literature; discovering these layers can in turn make us better writers (Prose 2007).
Here you are talking about a main idea in Prose’s book and paraphrasing it in your own words, so you only need to place her last name and year the book was published in parentheses, and voila, you are done!
But maybe you want to use Prose’s own words. If you want to bring in more than two words directly from her writing, you would include those in quotation marks, so that your readers can differentiate between your words and hers. Because you are citing something specific from the book, you would also add the page number. The idea is to give your reader a way to quickly find the source text you are referring to. You could do it something like this:
Reading closely involves “pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer has made” (Prose, 2007, p. 3).
Here, because you copied her words into your writing, you want to clearly mark where her words start and finish, and you do this by enclosing Prose’s words in quotation marks. To tell your reader whose words they are, and where to find them, you add the citation in parentheses. Here, the only thing that’s different from the first example above is that you added the page number where the line you copied appears in the original text. This was on page 3 of her book, so you add that to the end of the author surname and year sequence. All the pieces of information are separated by commas (though this is not always the case, depending on the citation style you choose–more on styles at the end!)
The second place where a citation appears is at the end of our writing. This is a separate section that starts after all of our writing ends. It is usually called a “Works Cited” section, or alternatively, a “Bibliography” and includes a list of all the texts we cited in-line throughout our writing. The idea behind this section is that we want to give our readers a bit more detail about the texts we cited, and we can take the space we need, because here it doesn’t interfere with our writing, and the purpose of the section itself is to be a reference guide for readers. For Prose’s book mentioned in the earlier examples, here is how it would appear in this section:
Prose, F. (2007). Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Harper Perennial.
Here, because you include more information about the book, it gives readers a more accurate reference to the text, which sometimes may not be clear from the in-line citation alone. Here, the sequence of information provided is pretty formulaic: (1) the author’s last name followed by initials, (2) the year the book was published in parentheses, (3) the title of the book in italics (italicized to differentiate it from the other information), and (4) the name of the book publisher. There is a period between each of the pieces of information. This sequence of information is pretty formulaic because of the need for standardization. This need exists because there are millions of texts in existence, and if everyone started giving information how they liked, it would be very confusing for readers to understand, given the number of different authors we all encounter in our daily life and work. Standardization helps readers find the source texts more easily, which is the whole point of the works cited section.
ABOUT THOSE CITATION STYLES
Now we come to the part that’s often most confusing for many of us. This is the multiple “styles” of citation. For example, the style mentioned above is only the “APA” style. There are other citational styles, such as the “MLA,” “Chicago,” “Turabian,” and more. Much to many college students’ (and professors’!) confusion, the sequencing of words (i.e. the format) can be different across these different styles. They also have different rules about where the commas and periods and parenthesis go. While it would have been ideal if we only had to deal with one style—it would make citations less mysterious for most of us—the various styles exist because some are more suited to certain disciplines than others. For example, the APA style was developed by the American Psychological Association, and, broadly speaking, is more popular today with social scientists. The MLA style was likewise developed by the Modern Languages Association, and is commonly used in the humanities. In general, you can choose between them to see which one you find most efficient, unless a specific style is required in your coursework.
This guide has focused on decoding the formula for a book citation. Since books are not the only things we need to cite as reference materials in our writing (this is a good thing!), it is also useful to know how to cite other sources, such as journals, magazines, newspapers, blogs, podcasts, films, TV shows, etc. All of these other sources share the same logic of why we need to cite them as described above, but the how varies across the type of source material. For example, what needs to be included for a blog is different from a book: in a blog, the website URL would also have to be provided along with other minor differences, like the date.
With the knowledge of the why and how explained here, you can practice citing various sources in your writing more confidently. Here are a few useful websites that provide examples of each of the different kinds of texts you may need to cite:
Note that there is a different website for each style. Most of the time, you can pick one, and then would have to take care to be consistent that you’re using the same one throughout your piece of writing. This means that all of your in-text citations, as well as the list of sources in the “works cited” follow ONE particular style, and not a mishmash of two or more.
For additional writing resources specific to the styles listed here, the Purdue OWL Writing Lab has offered clarity on citing properly to generations of scholarly writers!
