Understanding Source Documentation

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Assignment by Ashleah Wimberly, Bedford New Scholar 2023

This activity is part of a series of lessons and activities that I do in my first and second-year writing courses to help students understand source documentation and citation conventions. I use this lesson and activity to jumpstart our conversations on why and how different academic disciplines use sources in their writing. After this lesson, our next step is typically to shift our attention from the ethics and mechanics of citations and to begin considering what Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson (2021) define as the rhetorical intertextuality of source use in academic writing.

Goals

1. Understand the rhetorical function of citation and documentation across different disciplines.
2. Identify some of the more common citation styles that students may come across in their academic careers.
3. Discuss what the citation and documentation conventions reveal about the values of the disciplines that use them.

Recommended Materials

• The handout included in the activity plan for students. It's best if students have a physical or digital copy on hand.

Suggestions and Alternatives for Instruction:

• You could do this entire activity in an editable document and place it on your LMS for students to access later. 
• The handout can be adapted using sources that students have read in class to deepen the connection between this activity and things they’ve read.
• This could be adapted into an online or out-of-class activity by creating discussion groups in your LMS and then having students discuss the handout and their responses.

Activity Plan

Suggested Introduction

I like to open this activity with a brief discussion on what students’ experiences have been with citations in the past, including what styles they’re familiar with and what they think is most important when citing. Often, this discussion will reveal some of students' frustrations or concerns about mechanical correctness of their citations and anxieties over plagiarism, which allows me to transition to a version of the following:

Documenting sources can feel like a painful exercise in following detailed and nit-picky guidelines. It becomes even more frustrating when the guidelines change because different courses want us to use a different documentation style – perhaps one that we’ve never heard of or have no familiarity with. Something to keep in mind is that all citation styles serve a particular function: it’s not just about representing sources – it’s also about helping our readers trace our thinking and reasoning.  

Just like any genre, documentation styles are created to fulfill a specific need that a group of writers have. Different citation styles emphasize different information depending on the subject, discipline, and publication method. The largest reason that writers become frustrated with documenting sources is because the rules can seem arbitrary – but there is a method to the madness once you understand how citation styles work. Every documentation style will include this basic information (written on board, or shown on projector, or included in handout):

Author       Title        Date

The format and order of this information plus any additional information will vary depending on the needs of the writer and audience. Here are a few of the most common documentation styles that you’re likely to run into during your college career and how some of these styles cite their sources in-text (direct students to look at the included handout).

Think-Pair-Share Activity

Step 1: Instruct students to skim the handout. Ask that they pay attention to the kind of information that each citation style privileges, and how the style presents that information.  

Step 2: Arrange students into groups/partners in whatever way you choose. I recommend groups no larger than three. Ask them to choose one of the styles and answer the following using the information in the handout:  

1. What disciplines use those styles? 
2. Why might these disciplines have developed their individual methods for incorporating sources?  
3. What is emphasized and deemphasized in those methods? 

Step 3: Ask students to share what citation style they chose and why they chose that style. The first question is a “gimme” because the answer is included in the handout for them. Move on to discussing the answers to the second and third questions, guiding students where necessary to keep the conversation flowing in a productive way.

Conclusion

This activity can help students better understand why citation styles work the way that they do and move them towards thinking about what different disciplines tend to value in their writing. I tend to emphasize how analyzing citations (both what’s cited and how it's cited/used) in a text can tell us a whole lot about what the author(s) want us, as readers, to take away from their writing.  A productive follow-up for this lesson and activity would be to direct their attention to how the texts they’ve read so far in the course document their sources and how those sources are used in their writing. As much as possible, I try to direct their attention towards how the mechanics of citation and documentation influence the way that sources are used in the text and the way the author(s) put the sources in conversation with each other and their own ideas.

Suggested Resources for Instructors

• The Citation Project provides several studies on source use that are available online as resources for instructors.
• The Association of College & Research Libraries’s Framework for Information Literacy is a valuable resource for understanding and teaching the interrelated nature of research and writing practices, values, and beliefs.