26 Documenting Sources Overview

Over the centuries of academic inquiry and writing, a few different groups have developed their own sets of expectations and rules that dictate how people who want to participate in the academic conversation about their subject should format their writing. These academic styles govern both how the paper should be formatted as well as how sources should be documented.

Formatting refers to how the paper should be set up and how you should organize your information. It addresses all kinds of questions:

• Do you double space?
• Do you put your name, date, and class at the top of the page? In what order? What should the date look like?
• Do you have page numbers? Where do they go? Do you put your name next to it?
• Do you bold your title? Do you make it bigger than the essay font? Underline it? Make it a pretty color?

There are many, many more questions like this that each style answers. Instead of looking at these styles like strict, picky rules that make your life difficult, look at them as a lot of thinking that you don’t need to do. They take all of those decisions off your hands and allow you to just focus on what you want to say.

The most important thing that citation styles do, though, is set up how you should document the sources you use in your writing. Every academic style that I have looked at has a two-part, buddy-system kind of approach to documenting sources: there is something that you need to put into the essay itself—part 1—and something somewhere else that contains all of the information that the reader needs in order to find your source—part 2. The first part should lead the reader directly to the full citation information; that’s what it’s for. If your reader finds one of your sources in your paper, they should have a clear and direct link to the full source information. Academic styles have figured out what those links should look like—once again—so that you don’t have to come up with something on your own. An established system makes it so that you don’t have to guess what you should do and so that your reader doesn’t have to figure out what every single different author has decided to do.

We’re going to take a closer look at the two most common academic styles used in university work: MLA and APA. We’ll take a closer look at each of these styles below, but there’s no way we’re going to be able to adequately cover over four hundred pages(!) of information from each style guide in any real depth,^[1] so if you have any further questions about either style, please feel free to search out the answers. Your professor will be a great resource, of course, but you won’t always be in this class or have access to your instructor. There are many great resources across the internet that can also help you figure out the trickier situations you’ll find yourself in, so you should find one that you understand and can use after this class has ended. Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a great place to start, but there are many other sites that can be effective resources.