For information on how to reference this website not for academic purposes see the skillsyouneed referencing guide. Citing and referencing information can be daunting for students who do not understand the principles. There are numerous ways to reference. different institutions, departments or lecturers may require different styles – check with your lecturer if you are unsure. Bad referencing is a common way for students to lose marks in assignments, it is worth both time and effort to learn how to reference correctly. your university may prefer the use of a different referencing system, check with your lecturer or in any study skills information you have been provided with. Most universities will want a signed declaration with submitted work to say that you have not plagiarised. Universities use anti plagiarism software to quickly find plagiarised work, this software usually pulls on huge databases of web sources, books, journals and all previously submitted student work to compare your work to.

When writing an essay, report, dissertation or other piece of academic work the key to referencing is organisation, keep notes of the books and journal articles you have read, the websites you have visited as part of your research process. There are various tools to help, your university may be able to provide you with some specialist software endnote – w.endnote.com or you can simply keep a list in a document or try zotero w.zotero.org a free plugin for the firefox browser. Record as much information as possible in references to make finding the original work simple. author/s – include the author/s name/s where possible. you should write the surname last name first followed by any initials. if there are more than three authors then you can cite the first author and use the abbreviation 'et al', meaning 'and all'.

300 Words Essay

For one, two or three authors: jones a, davies b, jenkins c for more than three authors jones a et al. in such cases either use the organisation name or the title of the document or webpage. date of publication you should include the year of publication or a more specific date if appropriate, for journal or newspaper articles/stories. for webpages look for the when the page was last updated. include dates in brackets 2012 after author information. if no date can be established then put no date. title of piece include the title of the piece this could be the name of the book, the title of a journal article or webpage. titles are usually written in italics. for books you should also include the edition if not the first to make finding information easier. often when books are republished information remains broadly the same but may be reordered, therefore page numbers may change between editions.

publisher information usually only relevant for books, you should include the publisher name and place of publication. page numbers if you are referencing a particular part of a book then you should include the page number/s you have used in your work. use p. url and date accessed for webpages you need to include the full url of the page once you have recorded the information, you have everything you need in order to reference correctly. your work should be both referenced in the text and include a reference list or bibliography at the end, the in text reference is an abbreviated version of the full reference in your reference list. If you are directly quoting in your text you should enclose the quote in quotation marks, and include author information: communication is simply the act of transferring information from one place to another. Skillsyouneed 2015 for longer direct quotations it may be neater to indent the quotation in its own paragraph.

1993 from memory to written record england 1066 – 1307 oxford, blackwell, p. 115 the same rules apply when you are referencing indirectly, you have not included a direct quote but you have used the ideas of another source. reference in your text and in your reference list or bibliography at the end of your document. Communication is … transferring information from one place to another if you need to add words to a quote for clarity then square brackets are used: ldquo communication is simply the act in communication skills of transferring information from one place to another. Rdquo you can use sic to note an original error and/or foreign spelling. Skillsyouneed is a uk site and therefore uses uk spellings: the color sic of the water.

As a student, it is important that you identify in your assessment when you are using the words or ideas of another author. the most accepted way of acknowledging the work of another author is to use a referencing system. at the department of lifelong learning you are required to use the harvard referencing system. Plagiarism can have disastrous consequences for students. if you are suspected of plagiarism you may find that your assignment receives a grade of zero. in extreme or repeated cases, you may find that your enrolment at the university is reviewed. for further information, please consult section 3 of the student handbook. In order to have an accurate record of what you have researched and therefore an accurate reference, it is important that you write down the details of your sources as you study. when taking notes, use a separate page for each new book, journal article, or electronic source. at the top of each page, clearly record the following information for future reference.

Try to collect the information on the left if it is available, but also record: the date you accessed the source the electronic address or email the type of electronic resource email, discussion forum, w page, etc in addition to these details, when you are taking notes, if you copy direct quotations or if you put the author’s ideas in your own words, write down the page numbers you got the information from. Including all spelling, capitalisation, punctuation, and errors. you may show the reader that you recognise an error and that you are correctly quoting the author by placing the term ‘sic’ in brackets after the error. Paraphrasing – this is when you take another author’s ideas and put them into your own words. you are still copying someone else’s work, so you must reference it. you do not need to use inverted commas when you paraphrase, but you must clearly show the reader the original source of your information. as a hypothetical example, fictitious author john phillips might have written a history book in 19 that examines generational changes. you might summarise and correctly reference the entire gist of his book in the following way.

In all other circumstances, please follow the guidelines below and be sure to include the author, date and page number/s. the formats are similar for each example so please note the use of punctuation, spacing and the order of information. direct quote from a book or journal article with one author when organising our time, adair 1988: 51 states that ‘the centrepiece will tend to be goals and objectives’. In these examples, ‘adair’ is the author, ‘1988’ is the year of publication and ‘51’ is the page number where the direct quote can be found.

direct quote from a book or journal article with two authors mccarthy and hatcher 1996: 69 70 insist that with presentations ‘structure must be clear and precise’. In these examples, the quote went over two pages therefore the page numbers were represented as 69 70, rather than as a single number. also notice from the examples so far, that when the quote ends the sentence, the full stop comes after the inverted comma. direct quote from a book or journal article with three authors fisher, ury and patton 1991: 37 suggest that when emotional issues cloud negotiation, ‘some thoughts are best left unsaid’. �some thoughts are best left unsaid’ when emotional issues cloud negotiation fisher, ury and patton, 1991: 37. If hypothetical authors morris, ling, brown, smith, and diaz wrote a book published in 20, a direct quote would look like this. note that in the next example, ‘et al’ means ‘and others’.

direct quote from a book or journal article with more than three authors when paraphrasing, use the same referencing style and conventions as you would for direct quotes, but with the material from the source put into your own words, and the inverted commas omitted. below is another comparative example of the direct quote versus paraphrasing. direct quote and paraphrasing from a source with a ‘corporate’ or government author the dfee 2001: 8 suggest that each year ‘some have estimated the cost to the country of poor literacy and numeracy skills to be as high as ј10 billion’. Or paraphrase the effect of low levels of adult numeracy and literacy skills could be costing britain around ј10 billion each year dfee, 2001: 8. You might also like to rearrange the quote so that the reference comes at the end, as you have been shown in previous examples.

When you are researching, you may come across a situation where the same author has written two books in the same year. to distinguish one title from another in your referencing, place a lower case letter after the publication date, with ‘a’ signalling the first reference, and ‘b’ signalling the second, and so on. Sometimes the author you are quoting from will quote another author to support his or her argument, much in the same way that you do when writing assignments. sometimes you want to use the same quote that the author of the source has used. when you do this, use the format below. Eisenberg and smith in bolton, 1986: 85 agree that ‘it is hard to assign general meaning to any isolated nonverbal sign’.

In the case above, bolton in his 1996 publication has quoted eisenberg’s and smith’s research to prove a point he was making about non verbal communication. If the author of a source is anonymous, replace the author’s surname with the title of the work in the brackets containing the reference. consider the following fictitious example. The flora and fauna of britain ‘has been transported to almost every corner of the globe since colonial times’ plants and animals of britain.

Sometimes you may wish to use material from lectures, discussions, interviews, or distance learning courses to supplement your assignments. use the following conventions to ensure that your referencing is correct adapted from lewis, 19: 26. Mr bob builder, managing director of builder’s construction, stated in an interview on 5 september 20 that ‘customers were increasingly asking for traditional methods and materials to be used in construction projects’. Dr wilma flintstone stated in her lecture on 5 september 20 that acid jazz has roots as far back as 1987. Adult learners should learn the art of effective note taking for the simple reason that students ‘are more likely to remember what they have heard or read if they take an active part in their learning’ dhann, 2001:3.