Paper writing tips This will be short … kind of

How to use Word to build references For every fact you need to credit, you must use an in-text citation At the end of the paper, you must have a Works Cited Citation should be in APA format

A sample background section This is color-coded to indicate that each particular colored sentence came from a different source, so each must get its own reference.

We need For each source, we need as much of the bibliographic information we can find We may not find everything, but we’re going to through the major kinds of sources you guys probably used in your research

Kinds of references “I just looked on wikipedia – it had everything about my topic anyway. I mean…I didn’t understand any of it, but who cares?” “Wikipedia and about.com are not references that are acceptable! You may use them to help you understand the facts, but you must locate other sources (.gov,.edu,.org) for your actual citations

Using a website with an author Here’s an example website we can use 143Aioniccpds.html 143Aioniccpds.html Say our first sentence comes from this website. We need to credit that fact as coming from this source

Building the first citation At the end of the first sentence, before the period, we insert the reference Click on the references tab on the Word toolbar Then click insert citation

Insert citation wizard Click “add new source” IF this is the first time referencing this source in your paper, you will not have to go through these steps each time you reference the same paper or website

The create new source menu Select the type of source, in our case here, the source is a web site Fill in all information you can – you may not be able to find all info

Finishing the reference Click OK, your paper should now show the reference like this: That, my friends is a proper in-text citation!

What if… The website has no author I can find? Don’t be afraid, leave that field blank in the create reference menu, your citation will now look like this: And that’s a good reference, too!

Citing a book for the second reference For those of you that actually found BOOKS… What’s a book? The format for entry is much the same…

Citing your book As before, place the cursor at the end of the sentence you need to place a citation into Fill in to the window as much information as you can find

Et voila! Another reference is created! That’s so easy even Elmo can do it!

Duplicating references But what if I need to use the same reference twice, do I have to type in all that stuff again? Nope, don’t be afraid! There is an easy shortcut for handling that!

If a reference needs to be repeated If the third sentence is from the same source as the first Click on the end of the sentence before the paragraph like you’ve been doing, and click the insert citation button You’ll notice previous references you’ve already created are still listed, click on the appropriate reference (the Ophart piece)

Again, presto! The first reference is repeated in the appropriate place at the end of the sentence!

Just one more kind Say you actually reference a real scientific journal There is no major difference, just with periodicals you need make sure you also say which issue it came from

Example of a journal Say this piece is referenced from the Journal Science As before, we click on the insert citation button create a new reference This time in the menu, we select journal article and fill in whatever we can There might be multiple authors – you do NOT alphabetize, you list the primary authors first, followed by everyone else

Ba da bing, you get this Do I have to include all of that information? I’m worried about saving the planet and that uses up a lot of letters! No, don’t be…you know. You could also just edit it to say – “(Kordella et al, 2011)” Or you could keep everything in the full reference – which would make your paper longer! Fluffing up papers to make them longer is evil! Look at my hair – I only wish it could look like Mr. Kordella’s!

So now what? Now we are going to pretend we are done creating new references. It’s time to create a Works Cited and it needs to be in APA style Elmo’s old teachers told him to call it a “Bibliography” and Elmo doesn’t know what “APA” means You imbecile! If you’ve learned anything so far it’s that WORD has many shortcuts to make things easier! And, your old teachers don’t matter anymore – you’re in My World now!

Creating the Works Cited Next to the button you’ve been using to create references, there is a tab called Bibliography Click it, and select Works Cited Make sure the style selector is set to APA

And here you go! Wow – that’s so easy even I could do it! Wow – you just said “I” instead of “Elmo”

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