Quinary Phase: Documenting Sources and Citation Styles

The more formal and academic your writing, the greater the chance that you’ll need to use other people’s writing to support your ideas. When you do that, you need to properly document your sources and provide citations to help your readers find any of the sources you’ve used. A few major citation styles have been developed over the years to govern what those citations and documentation should look like and help to reduce the chaos that would exist if everyone had to make up their own rules. We’re going to talk about a couple of the most important and common citation styles used in academic writing and the basic rules you need to follow to comply with their standards.