Citation styles and academic writing help
It’s essential for students at Union to do a great deal of writing and research for their coursework. Our Library offers you nearly unlimited materials to read and use as sources. And as soon as you begin to use these sources, you will need to keep track of where the ideas and information came from, so you can properly attribute credit to these writers and their work. Many sites to help you do this are available online; below you will find links to a few of them.
The Duke University Library has created a helpful website explaining the mechanics of preparing term papers and other written projects. It shows you how to cite sources within your paper (in footnotes or in parenthetical citations) and how to assemble a list of all sources cited (in a bibliography). It provides examples from five different style manuals : APA, Chicago, MLA, Turabian and CSE. It covers citations for books and periodical articles in print or electronic formats. For citing sources within your paper or preparing a bibliography, click HERE. You will also find links to other useful information about research and writing techniques and standards on those pages.
The University of Chicago maintains another convenient “Quick Guide” specifically for the Turabian style manual (an abridged version of the complete Chicago reference guide). To reach the Turabian site, click HERE.
Also, for those occasions when you need to use the SBL Handbook style manual, Baylor University has collected some very handy links to online information about the SBL style HERE.
Cornell University offers a very concise, well-designed site explaining how to avoid plagiarism or the incorrect appropriating of published information. Clear and direct definitions lead you step-by-step through their site, and they also provide a set of exercises or a simple self-test that you can use as a “guest.” To reach Cornell’s plagiarism site, click HERE.
For improving your general academic writing skills, many people recommend the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL). It offers examples and tutorials to address the problems students often experience, and also provides resources specifically for students who are not native English speakers.
How do you evaluate a website to determine whether its content is reliable? A vast amount of information is published online, but it’s not always easy to tell if the source is credible or not. Some useful sites explaining how to do this are provided by Cornell, BYU, Georgetown and EasyBib.
For tutoring assistance with English composition, Hebrew, or Greek in connection with your UPSem coursework, please contact Dr. John Carroll or Megan Strollo for further information.