Writing Guides

🗣️ From speaking with friends... 

Imagine you meet your friends for coffee after class. When you arrive, they're in the middle of a debate about a controversial new show on Netflix. You're brand new to the conversation, however, so before you can participate, you have to listen and ask questions in order to get caught up. Maybe you've never seen the show, so you have to watch it in order to become properly informed. You come back next week, same time and place, and tell your friends what you've learned and what you think. 

📚 ...to speaking with scholars 

Learning how to read and write in academic genres is also a process of joining a conversation. When you start your studies, you're brand new to the conversation. You need to read and listen and learn before you can start to participate in the discourses of your chosen field. 

The scholarly conversation is made explicit in academic writing through the citation of relevant voices. Citation allows students to demonstrate their learning just as it allows scholars to demonstrate the need for and validity of their research. Through citation, academics hold complex conversations across time and space, listening to scholars from the past or from around the world and preparing to make a contribution of their own. 

🌎 Intertextuality 

All writing, like all dialogue, is intertextual (Bazerman, 2004). This means that every statement is related to the statements which came before it, which exist alongside it, and which will follow afterwards. Citation--the acknowledgement of one's sources and references--is a feature of writing and speech which makes their intertextuality explicit. A citation says, this is how I know this information. 

📌 Why cite? 

We often cite our sources informally, as, for example, when we say, “I hear it’s going to rain today.” But scholarly citation is not informal. Scholarly citation is a highly formalized feature of academic writing. It enables researchers to communicate with each other in a rigorous, traceable, and persuasive fashion. 

• 🥇 Rigorous: Citations enable writers to acknowledge the scholarly context for their research and the sources of their information. In particular, scholars often cite peer-reviewed sources, which are the gold standard for the publication of new knowledge.  
• 🧵Traceable: Citations provide a thread of references which allows readers to trace the origins of the information being presented. This traceability invites readers to follow the history of an intellectual argument or the development of a research field back to its origins. It also helps enable verification of any claims as well as further exploration of the cited sources. 
• 💪 Persuasive: Citations are a persuasive feature of academic writing. By referring to authoritative and relevant sources, writers bolster their arguments, demonstrate the depth and originality of their research, and convince readers of their expertise. Citations also help demonstrate that the author is writing knowledgeably, accurately, and with accountability—attributes which are likely to be persuasive to an academic audience. 

🔬 Discipline and style 

Academics organize themselves into disciplinary communities. This is why universities have departments for scholars who study English language and literature, nursing departments for scholars who study nursing, and so on.

Academics create citation styles by following a similar rationale. The conventions of citation styles such as the Modern Language Association (MLA 9th ed.) and American Psychological Association (APA 7th ed.). are not arbitrary. The formats of the various styles are determined by the objects and methods of study, as well as shared values and beliefs, of the distinct groups of researchers who use the style (Hyland, 2012). 

All citations, irrespective of style, consist of two essential components: the in-text citation and reference entry. Both are required. (These examples are formatted according to APA 7th ed. guidelines.) 

MacEwan Library Citation Guides 

These citation guides help orient users toward some of the most commonly used citation styles including MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. 

Meskanas Tutorial: Citation and Scholarship: APA 7th Edition

Meskanas Tutorial: Citation and Scholarship: MLA 9th Edition 

The Writing Centre offers APA and MLA mêskanâs tutorials on citation. Each tutorial has two parts. The first part introduces the rhetorical perspective on citation practices across the disciplines, and the second part introduces the underlying principles of APA or MLA style.

Bazerman, C. (2004). Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts. What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices. Bazerman, C. and Prior, P. eds. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 83-96. 

Hyland, K. (2012). Disciplinary identities: Individuality and community in academic discourse. Oxford UP.