Ya Gotta Have Style

Photo by Randy Son of Robert

No, I don’t mean your plaid hiphuggers with your striped socks. . . I’m refering to citation style. As an undergrad student, your professors will naturally assume that you know nothing about anything. (Probably, because in their own opinion, they know EVERYTHING about everything.) Therefore, they don’t want to hear your opinion unless you can back it up with proof from a reputable source (sorry, Wikipedia just won’t cut it for writing academic papers.) Different departments have different requirements for citing your sources. I’m going to outline a few of them below:

1)Modern Language Association(MLA)–According to the website of the Modern Language Association, MLA citation style is ” widely used in the humanities, especially in writing and literature.” MLA citation style is generally simpler than other styles. It features “parthenical citations” that are cited in an alphabetized list of works at the end of the paper. Let’s say that you are citing Dr. Suess in your paper. You would put a direct quotation from the good doctor in quotation marks, then in parentheses note the person you are quoting (Suess) and the page number you found the information on. It goes like this: “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like it, Sam-I-Am” (Suess 123.) Notice that the period goes inside the parentheses. There are lots of other picky little conventions to follow as well. Do yourself a favor and buy a good MLA handbook. If you are a student in the humanities, you will use it throughout your college career, so it will be a good investment.

2) American Psychological Association(APA)–APA citation style is commonly used in the  sciences  It is more complex than MLA style.   A paper written in APA style typically has eight sections, which each appear on a new page:

1.  Title  Page    
2. Abstract (A short  overview of the contents of your  paper.)
3. Body
4. References
5. Footnotes
6. Tables (a new page for each table.)
7. Figure captions.
8. Figures (a new page for each figure.)

Instead of listing the author’s name and the page number you found your reference for as in MLA style, you will instead list the author’s last name and the date of publication of the article or book that you are citing.  In our Dr. Suess example, this would be “I do not like green eggs and ham” (Suess, 1964.)  The citation style is too complicated to go into much depth on these pages; I suggest that you purchase a solid APA handbook for easy reference for this complex citation style.

3) Chicago–This citation style is primarily used in the humanities, especially for history. There are two different ways to use this citation style, by notes and bibliography and by an author-date system. Different professors will have their own preferences as to which division of this style they prefer that you would use.

For more information about citation styles, the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Perdue University is an excellent source. It has many types of references for writers, including citation styles, help for ESL writers, literary analysis and criticism and more.