How Do I Cite This?

Have you ever found yourself asking the question, “How do I cite this?” I know I have.

Well, on Tuesday, October 8, the CMWR hosted its Autumn Quarter workshop, “How Do I Cite This: Incorporating Sources and Understanding Academic Integrity” to help writers across the DePaul community learn how. With a turnout of over 70 writers, this was our biggest workshop yet!

The academic system in the US, just like other academic systems, has specific conventions and rules for citing, and a lot of times, these conventions and rules can be hard to understand. Students may not always know what to cite, what a citation should look like or what should go into a citation. Not to mention why we cite in the first place. We wanted to answer these questions to help students understand why we cite, and then we wanted to show them how to actually do it.

Many writers in attendance were already familiar with the reasons we cite in American academia: to develop our own credibility, to provide a map of our research, and to give credit to others for their ideas to name a few. Our main focus was examining the two parts of a citation: the in-text citation and the bibliographic citation contained in the Works Cited or References page. We covered how to format citations for both APA and MLA and then worked through the ins and outs of quoting and paraphrasing. The writers were then given the chance to get their hands dirty with some quoting and paraphrasing and bibliographic activities.