Post-7: Formatting your Reference Lists

Dear All,

This post explains to you how to make references to the resources, such as journal articles, books, websites and more in your writing. As you probably know and as we are going to discuss today during the class, there are 2 kinds of references you should provide in your writing. 

The first kind of references is made in the text you are composing, and thus they are called in-text. They include the following information:

The author's or authors' last name(s) followed by the page number(s):

e.g., In his book "Crafting critical writing", the author Troy Hicks discusses different features of writing across media and genres (Troy, 4)

In the end of your work, you should have a full list of references that has information about all the resources you have used in your work. It is alphabetical and must contain the following  details: 

The author's name or authors' last name(s), year of publication, NAME of the journal/book/website, more specific details

There are several common referencing styles, which include the following:
-MLA designed by the Modern Language Association
-APA designed by the American Psychological Association 
-Turabian https://www.thoughtco.com/turabian-style-guide-with-examples-1857607
- and many more

And here is a short reference list I've prepared for you as an example. It contains a list of books on different aspects of Academic Writing:

1.  Baron, N. Alphabet to Email. Routledge, 2001.

    2. Godfrey, J. How to Use your reading in your Essays. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

    3. King, S. On Writing. A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner, 2001.

    4. OWL at Purdue (https://owl.purdue.edu/). Accessed: 26.03.2019.
    5. Research and Citation (https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/chicago_manual_17th_edition/cmos_formatting_and_style_guide/general_format.html). Accessed: 25.03.2019.

    Here is another example of a Complete Reference List that you can access at https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-works-cited-pages.html

The differences between them are in the kind of details provided and how they are formatted. For the purposes of this class, we are going to use the MLA referencing style. You can access the manual detailing different features  of this style by following the link below:

https://www.library.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/mla_style_revised.pdf

In the beginning, it could be difficult for you to remember how to format your references correctly, so I think it is a good idea for you to have some practice making references correctly in your course papers and essays. Here is an exercise for you to complete: 

Go to Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/ and complete the following tasks:

I am interested in researching writing, so this is the query I formulated on Google scholar:

Task 1: Choose 1 work in Russian (and 1 in English if you have it) from your reference list for your course paper and prepare one in-text and one complete reference

Task 2: Prepare a full reference list for your course paper. As far as I know, it should contain 5 works, so your task is to prepare it, publish it in your own blog and share the link to it in the thread below.

Task 3: Look through one of the Reference Lists prepared by your peers and check whether it is formatted correctly. Let your peer know if there is some problem with the prepared list. It could be that some information is missing, the order of details is not quite correct or there is some other problem.

I'm sure that completing this task will help you remember better how to format your references correctly.                

Good luck!