Be careful not to "over-cite" your sources. Seventy-five percent of your essay should be your own words and ideas. Only 25% (at the most) should be information cited from your sources.
Do not use block quotes, which are four lines or longer. Cite three lines, or less, at a time. Use the ellipsis (. . .) to let the reader know that some material has been omitted.
There are two components to any source of information you use: the ideas and the words.
There are two ways of using information in your work: direct quotes and paraphrasing. (We'll call summarization a kind of large-scale paraphrase. The big idea of a book or article may be summarized, while a sentence or two at a time may be paraphrased. Same principle applies to both, however.)
Every time you refer to information that is not your original conclusion and is not common knowledge, you must give credit to where that information comes from. (Whether it's quoted OR paraphrased!)
You will typically note in parentheses the author's/authors' names and relevant page number, if available.
When there's no author, your citation starts with the article title, and your in-text citation will use that.
It's all about making it easy for your reader to make a one-to-one connection by just skimming down the left edge of the Works Cited page.
Lone Star College-University Park • Student Learning Resource Center
20515 SH 249 • Building 12, 8th Floor • Houston, TX 77070
This work by Lone Star College-University Park Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 