Many of the students with whom you will work do not understand that each discipline has its own disciplinary guide for documenting sources. First, ask if the class or discipline has a specific style that should be followed. Most disciplines use a specific guide; for instance, English uses the MLA Handbook while Family Life often uses the APA Guide. Other common guides are the Turabian guide, Campbell/Ballou, and Chicago Style. You can purchase these in the bookstore, or the Writing Center (RBW101) has reference copies as does the Merrill Library. A good general guide that lists both MLA and APA style is A Writer's Reference, also available in the bookstore.

Below, we've put together some examples from the MLA Handbook so you will have a guide for documenting sources that will be used in your papers. Remember that any writer has several valuable resources for writing a documented paper: 1) personal experiences and observations; 2) the experiences and observations of others -- discovered through interviews, surveys; 3) library sources (e.g., articles, books, government documents, films). We list the most common below. In general, use parenthetical -- also called in-text citation -- documentation rather than footnotes or endnotes; in addition, include a page for "Works Cited" or "References."

A word about plagiarism: "To avoid plagiarism, you must cite all quotations, summaries, and paraphrases as well as any facts or ideas that are not common knowledge." (Diana Hacker, A Writer's Reference, 169).

How to Use Parenthetical Documentation: When you quote or paraphrase, note author and page number in parentheses following the information unless you have used the author's name in the sentence itself.

Example 1: "It's time to move past the teaching versus research debate" (Boyer 12).
Example 2: Boyer asserts that "it's time to move past the teaching versus research debate" (12).

Set off quotations of more than four typed lines by indenting 10 spaces from the left margin; do not single space.

How to Make a List of Works Cited: The basic format for books includes sections (each followed by a period):

1) the author's name with last name first;
2) the title and subtitle, underlined; and
3) the place of publication, the publisher, and the date. The format for periodicals (journals, magazines) includes title of the author, title of periodical, date, and page numbers.

Book:
Boyer, E. L. Scholarship Revisited. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation, 1990.
Hacker, Diana. A Writer's Reference. NY: St. Martin's, 1989.

Article:
Kinkead, Joyce, and Patricia Stoddart. "Pen Pals." English Journal 5.2 (1987): 41-49.

Interview:
Chatterton, Chalyce. Personal interview. 1 March 1993.

Some Reminders: When in doubt about format, look it up. You can save yourself a lot of trouble by noting complete documentation when you find a source that you want to use so you do not have to make a return trip to the library for that information. The examples we've offered here are general. There are specific guidelines for citing films, records, edited books, corporate authors, unknown authors, and so on.

Rarely do you find hard-and-fast rules in style, but here are two you can count on:

1. Commas and periods always go inside the second quotation mark. "Boyer is regarded as the godfather of the teaching-research debate."
2. Never put a comma before a parentheses. "Teaching shapes both research and practice" (16), notes Boyer.