Documentation

Everybody’s favorite subject

Documentation means keeping track of your sources and giving them credit for the ideas and words you

borrow from them.

This prevents you from committing plagiarism.

Some people think that if they change some of the words of a source, they have not plagiarized.

NOT TRUE!

You must give credit for ideas as well as for words.

Okay, so how do you document where you got what you learned?

1. Keep track of where the ideas in your notes came from.

“Arthur Miller was considered the most brilliant playwright of his generation.”McDuff, page 22.

If you take notes and you lose track of who said what, you’re like a Christmas morning when all the gift tags

have been ripped off.

Now you’ve followed step #1. You’ve kept good notes with the sources attached.

How do you show where each idea or quotation came from in your paper?

That’s step #2: in-text citations.

Don’t faint! You can do it!

In-text citations include, at the MOST, 4 things:

1. A parenthesis (

2. Author’s last name McDuff

3. Page number 20

4. Another parenthesis )

That’s IT. Just 4 simple ingredients.

(McDuff 20)

Now you need to know

How to place and punctuate your nice, fresh in-text citation.

Place it in the sentence in which the quotation or idea appears.

That means inside the period that closes that sentence.

But place it outside the quotation.

You’re not quoting the author’s last name, are you?

It looks like this:

Arthur Miller was widely celebrated in his day, and was even considered “the most brilliant playwright of his generation” (McDuff 22).

Isn’t that so nice and easy?

But what about if the quotation or idea ends in a question or exclamation?

Miller also inspired other critics to wonder, “What if he had had a sense of humor?” (Boone 78).

Now you know how to create citations:

Four ingredients ( Author page ) outside the quotation inside the sentence

But what do they mean?

Think of your paper like a map.The in-text citations are the symbols and colors on the

map.

But what do those symbols mean?

You need the legend to tell you.

The legend for your in-text citations is the

“Works cited” page.

Ta da!

The “Works cited” page lists all the works you cited.

Hence the name.

It lists them in alphabetical order.

No numbers!

The indentation is the opposite of what you use for paragraphs.

You want the alphabetized names to stick out on the left!

It looks like this:

You can use NoodleTools to help you create your “works cited” entries.

You can also remember this simple mnemonic to write entries for books:

Arthur tore Candy’s prom dress.

Author title city publisher date

Here is one winning combination:

And here is another:In-text citations

works cited page

DOCUMENTATION!

And that’s what we want.