Activity 4:  Cite a Source

Pre-Activity

• Make sure that you have been given credit on your worksheet for downloading and/or emailing articles.
• Be sure you have copied and pasted the MLA citation for each article.

Activity 4:  Cite a Source

• If you use a source in a paper, project, or any other type of presentation, whether the original source is a printed book, magazine or newspaper, a website, a video, or picture other than one you produced yourself, you must give proper credit to the original source. This is called "citing a source."  Your teacher may call it a "bibliography", which is a compilation of all the sources you gathered and read, or "works cited", which is only the sources you cited or documented in your research.
• There are various styles used in citing a source, but the most common in high school is MLA.
• Failure to give proper credit may cause suspicion of plagiarism and prompt your teacher to give you a failing grade.

You are now ready to begin your activity.

1. Online databases usually provide the citation in several formats, so just copy the citation into a Word document with the correct format.
2. The correct MLA format is double-spaced with a hanging indentation.  (The librarian will show you how to fix the format, as the assignment progresses.)
3. Occasionally, the citation from a database is not exactly correct from human or computer errors.  Check Purdue OWL or MLA Style Center for the latest and most correct methods for citing.

You may want to look over this MLA 8 YouTube video in case you need a reminder about MLA format.  

It's also helpful to know there are sites like EasyBib or Citation Machine that will create some citations for you.  

You are now ready to move on to Activity 5:  Website Evaluation