REPORTING, REFERENCES AND QUOTATIONS

The inclusion of references and quotations in academic work is an important part of your writing, particularly in research work. At the end of the last unit, you briefly considered ways in which this could be done legitimately. We shall now look at this in greater detail. References and quotations should be included for the following two main reasons:

1. They indicate to the reader the range, extent and nature of source materials you have used to support or challenge the ideas discussed in your work. They show you have read up on your subject area and are able to select appropriate materials.

2. They are an acknowledgement that parts of your work are derived from the material of others and indicate how you have developed your particular approach.

There are two basic methods of acknowledging source materials: by reporting through paraphrase or by direct quotation. Footnotes are used to provide additional explanations or details of work.

REPORTING USING PARAPHRASE

Reporting uses paraphrase (i.e. expressing the ideas of an author in your own words) to acknowledge another author's ideas. You can extract and summarise important points, while at the same time making it clear from whom and where you have got the ideas you are discussing.

For example:

Brown (1983: 231) claims that a far more effective approach is...

Brown is the name of the author (always refer to the surname), and the information in brackets refers to the year and page number of the publication quoted, details of which should be presented in the bibliography at the end of your essay. Generally you should put the year in brackets after the surname but variations on this form are possible. It is useful but not essential to give page numbers. In some disciplines, it is common to give only the page number in brackets after the author's name.

REFERENCE TO SOURCE

This is similar to reporting except that here the authors' names are given in brackets only and are not referred to directly in the text.

For example:

Several researchers have testified to the limitations of this method (Koo, 1985; Manson, 1961; Watkins, 1979).

A previous report (Blake, 1977) indicates the importance of such prior knowledge.

Note also the example in the second sentence of the extract in the short task above.

Again, full details of the work of authors mentioned should be given in the bibliography.

DIRECT QUOTATION

It may be desirable to quote the original author's exact words. If you do so, keep the quotations as brief as possible and only quote when you feel the author expresses an idea or opinion in such a way that it is impossible to improve upon it or when you feel that it captures an idea in a particularly succinct and interesting way. For example:

The audiolingual approach to language learning is summed up succinctly by Alexander (1968): 'Listen before you speak, speak before you read, read before you write'.

Direct quotations (i.e. using the exact words of another author) are used in the following instances:

• when the wording of the original is particularly pertinent to an idea you are discussing and cannot be improved upon

• when you wish to quote an accepted authority to support a line of argument

• to avoid any ambiguity or misrepresentation of source material.

When you are using a direct quotation of a single phrase or sentence, single quotation marks should be used around the words, which must be quoted exactly as they are in the original. However, note the following:

• You may wish to omit some of the author's original words which are not relevant to your writing. In this case, use three dots ( . . . ) to indicate where you have omitted words.

• The material quoted may already contain a quotation. Here it is necessary to change the single quotation marks ( ' . . . ' ) in the original to double quotation marks ( " . . . " ) to indicate that these were the author's quotation marks and not yours.

Apart from the changes in quotation marks mentioned above, you should reproduce exactly the punctuation and spelling of the original. Longer quotations, of more than three lines, should be indented as a separate paragraph with no quotation marks,

FOOTNOTES

Footnotes are used to provide additional explanations or details of work by other writers referred to in the main text. They are generally indicated by a raised number at the end of the sentence to which reference is made. They may appear at the bottom of the page to which they refer, in which case they are usually separated from the main text by a ruled line. Alternatively, they may be found at the end of a piece of work (in a book, this could be the end of a chapter or the end of the book). Normally, such information placed at the end of work is given the heading 'Notes'.

Sources:

Mackay, John T & S.E. (1998). Study Skills For Academic Writing. London: Prentice Hall Internaional English Language Teaching.