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EWC Faculty Resources
Help Your Students Improve Their Writing
- Guest Lecuture Guidelines
- Helping Students Avoid Plagiarism
- Teaching Students to Cite Online Sources
Designing Effective Writing Assignments
- Types of Writing Assignments
- Informal and Formal Writing Assignments
- Characteristics of Effective Writing Assignments
- Guiding Questions for Developing Assignments
- Assignment Description Checklist
- Assessing the Research and Writing Process
- Sequencing Assignments
Teaching Students to Cite Online Sources - Faculty Resources
When students support ideas in their own writings with Web-based reference materials, they need to cite their sources. But even recent editions of the major bibliographic style guides such as the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Modern Language Association's MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers lack examples of citations of Web-based materials. A scheme your students may use for citing Web sources in APA format is suggested by Andrew Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger in Online!: A Reference guide to using internet sources (1997):
- Author's name (if known)
- Date of publication or last revision (if known), in parenthesis
- Title of document
- Title of complete work (if applicable), italicized or underlined
- URL, in angle brackets
- Date of access, in parentheses
Other guides to citing electronic source materials can be found on the Web.
Here's a handy list, presented in the Web-citation style preferred by APA.
Citation Guides. (1996). UMUC Information and Library Services.
http://www.umuc.edu/library/citationguides.html
(19 Feb. 2004).
Harnack, A. & Kleppinger, E. (1996). Beyond the MLA handbook.
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/inbox/mla_archive.html
(19 Feb. 2004).
Walker, J. R. and Taylor, T. (1998). The Columbia Guide to Online Style. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html
(19 Feb. 2004).
Note: The Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) has an excellent set of handouts for students on citing sources in APA and MLA styles. For electronic sources not covered in the APA or MLA stylebooks, the Purdue OWL refers students to the Walker Web pages.