Citing Sources
You will be adding your voice to on-going scholarly and professional conversations around second language acquisition. Providing citations is an opportunity to acknowledge your predecessors and contemporaries as you engage with and build upon their ideas.
For this course you use MLA style to cite your sources. The resources below are a great place to find direction and check the citations that you create against the official MLA Handbook guidelines.
Discovery Search allows you to generate citations for a book, article, or other resource on its catalog record.
Look for "Tools" on the right of the page, and select "Cite". This will show you citations in many style including MLA 9th Edition. Once you've generated a citation, proceed with caution! These citations are machine generated and only as good as the data that they draw from. Capitalization and punctuation errors are common. Using these generated citations as a starting point and checking them against the MLA style resources, making edits as necessary, above saves you some initial effort while still producing a polished result.
Citation managers
Citation managers are software that makes it simple to store citations and create works cited pages. You'll still need to review inputs and outputs for accuracy, but their automated capabilities do away with a great deal of menial sorting and organizing.
Zotero
Zotero is a free, open source citation manager that is popular in the humanities and social sciences. Using it will save you a lot of time and headaches in the long run. At the risk of sounding like an infomercial, just try it!
The library offers an extensive guide to getting started with Zotero.
