5-Minute Citation Workshops

Communication Across the Curriculum
Monmouth College
Dr. Steve Price, Director

(22 February 2007)

At Monmouth College, we directly teach citations throughout the freshman year in ILA, CATA 101, and ENGL 110. Many of your address the same information in your own courses, as well. So, we know that the students have been introduced to the basics. Still, as many of you have reported, by the time students get to other courses, sometimes only a semester removed, it's as if they have never seen a Works Cited page in their lives.

For what it's worth, we're not alone. Knowledge of citations has a notoriously short shelf life for students, and faculty at most schools lament the excessive number of miss-cited web pages, on-line journal articles, and even old-fashioned books that they encounter in student writing.

I would like to suggest that we change strategies a bit, treating citation not as a fact (i.e. you learned it last year) but as a skill requiring ongoing practice and development. Such ongoing attention need not take up a lot of your course time. In fact, let me propose using:

5-Minute Workshops on Citing Sources

In the days before a project is due, ask students to identify a tricky source from their own research--the "on-line journal article, from a database, without pagination, that's been reprinted from an anthology," for example.

As a class, take out your handbooks (MLA, APA, Bedford, etc.) and start searching:

	Remind the class that a two-step approach to citations generally works pretty well: identify the text you're working with copy the format from the corresponding sample
	Point out to the class that the index is a good place to start, once you've identified the text.
	Point out to the class that finding a "pretty close" example is a good place to start.
	Point out to the class that citations are not always an exact science and that occassionally it will take some time to locate an appropriate sample in the handbook.
	Don't panic over the citation you can't quite make perfect in 5 minutes. Ask the students to fine-tune it overnight and look again the next class period.