Citation In Academic Writing-Unit 2 Integrative Assigment- Villegas-Garcia-

Citation in academic writing

Academic writing does not only imply using proper language and vocabulary but also knowing how to cite or document sources when we are using someone else's words. There are many systems to avoid plagiarism and several manuals can be used. In this paper, we will use the American Psychological Association (APA) manual for the analysis of in-text references. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of in-text citations, signal phrases and the reference list form the article by Dalvit, , Murray, and Terzoli, (2005), Providing increased Access to English L2 students of computer science at a South African University, published in  US-China Education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol 2 (9).

When using APA format, in-text citations include the author's last name, the date of publication and if the quote is direct, the page number separated by commas. In the case of this article, these citations include only the date placed in parentheses and not the author's name, on page 73 for instance the following example can be observed for a signal phrase: "Halliday and Martin (1993)" , however, when making reference to a study, both the author's last name and the year are placed in parentheses as in the following example (Boughey, 2002). In-text citations may also refer to an institution or group, such as "Webster's Online Dictionary, 2005" or "Council on Higher Education, 2001", in both cases the full name of both sources has been included in the reference list.

As regards signal phrases, authors use them in different ways when they include quoted or cited material into their texts. Referring to the article, the only expression used is "according to" as in most of the cases the name of the author or the institution is included at the end of the sentence. For instance, on page 72 the following signal phrases can be observed: “According to Heugh (2002), little has changed since the end of Apartheid.”

Concerning reference lists, they are placed at the end of any paper so that the reader can find and refer to the same sources the author has included. It is important to emphasize that every single citation that has been included in the body of the paper should be properly included in the reference list and every source that has been included in the reference list should appear in the body of the paper. In this particular case, the word "references" is not centered at the top of the page and the list is not written on a separate page from the main text. Moreover, each entry in the list is not double-spaced and it does not have one-inch margins. However, the entries are alphabetically ordered and different types of sources are included such as books, reports or websites.

To conclude, academic writing is not only related to using proper language and vocabulary but also to knowing how to cite sources when using someone else's words in order to avoid plagiarism. Although the analyzed article complies with the APA style for documenting sources avoiding plagiarism, the reference list does not fully apply to the required guidelines.

References

 

 Dalvit, L., Murray, S. and Terzoli, A. (2005). Providing increased access to English L2 students of computer science at a South African University. US-China Education Review, Sep. 2005, Vol. 2 (9)