CITING SOURCES



Citing Sources



Citing Sources

During My Final Year in graduate school, I began teaching business communication. Without much forethought, I asked students to write a report with a sources requirement. When students turned their reports in, I learned that we were worlds apart on the practice of citing such sources. As a student in a rarefied academic environment, I wrote with proper citations. My students did not. I spent classroom time discussing citation practice. Their performance did not improve (Guffey, 1997).

Students have long struggled with citation, and the causes of their poor performance are uncertain. The ESL literature does suggest one cause: Students from some cultures find the concept of intellectual property immoral, so for that small subset there is an explanation for poor citation practice (Guffey, 1997). But studies of U.S.-born students show that a large number of individual and contextual factors may be implicated. Students continue to feign ignorance or deflect criticism onto others, even after prior instruction has been documented.

Standard stylebook instructions for parenthetic notation emphasize reader orientation and ease in moving back and forth between text and source or reference list, But a business context introduces other complications addressed in examples shown in the handout. As a result, I have developed practices for class that differ from some we find in contemporary style manuals.

Except for the Clark citation, the samples in the handout follow American Psychological Association (APA) style; the last is from the current APA Publication Manual (2001, p. 272). When I discuss reference formatting (McCabe, Trevino & Butterfield, 2001), I talk about the concept of discourse communities to set up the idea that each community may have its own needs and, therefore, may develop different format requirements. Many students are familiar with two such communities--humanities and Modern Language Association (MLA) and social sciences and ...