Referencing an assignment is a challenging task for students. The prerequisite for this daunting errand is that the students need good writing skills and great command over English. The language should be flawless i.e. sans any grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. The students should make use of their free time to learn writing skills. Reading books, improving the vocabulary, mastering grammar should be the foremost task on the list. Secondly, the assignment requires referencing. Every university or subject has a different referencing style. You need to tune to its protocol.
International Institutions have their own set of rules while the local institutions have their own. But the question arises why do we even need referencing? Referencing is nothing but highlighting your use of other’s work or ideas that have been published. Each time you quote or write inspired by something you might have read elsewhere, you must include a source reference.
The reference can be books, newspapers, magazines, websites, etc. Every time your writing is based on information found elsewhere you need to include a source of reference. This can be your own previous work which you have written for previous projects. Referencing can be said to be a necessary evil where you need to mention the so-called author’s ideas to validate your ideas or arguments. Also, it also throws light on the fact that you are well versed of the topic in question. Apart from that, referencing should be done in such a way that it can enable the reader to follow the original work and the main thing is that never forget the fact that referencing is done to avoid plagiarism.
The main purpose of referencing is to give credit to the people whose work you have quoted or applied, to academically support your own view or work. Also, it enables the work to be in reach of the readers so that they can obtain the work and crosscheck if they have reached to the same conclusions.
Thus referencing forms a substantial part of academic project or assignment. References can be structured in various ways:
- Source references must be structured according to the APA referencing style according to communication and digital media. Page numbers though not required if included provide clarity. For works with no obvious indication of an author, replace the author with the title.
- When adding link references, the author of the website needs to be referred to or the organization behind it.
- For works with two authors, both names should be listed in each reference
- For works with three, four or five authors, all authors should be listed in the first reference
- For works with six or more authors, the first author should be listed followed by et al., year of publication
- Do not include any titles in the author’s name such as Dr. or Ms.
- For pictures, images and maps provide citations if you did not create yourself. Even if the picture is small it needs a citation.
Presenting others work as your own either by copy-pasting texts, images, taking credit for others’ ideas and presenting them as your own without giving the original authors their due credit is plagiarism. It is a serious offense and you can be demoted for this act of yours if you get caught. Much anti-plagiarism software exist which has a huge database of web sources, books, journals and work done by others. It is morally unethical to plagiarize. So refrain from plagiarizing. This is done by referencing the sources of information you chose to incorporate or publish in your so-called assignment.
Stay organized by stacking notes, journals or articles, websites you need to support your ideas or work. Read them thoroughly. In fact, it depicts the depth of your research and enables the one reading it to verify that the sources that you used are correct.
When you use images, maps and pictures of someone else’s, provide a citation and very often you are required to get permission from the copyright holder to use the image. Usually, copyright permission is hassle-free for students as they will be using it for academic reasons and not for commercial purposes. Articles, Books, Thesis and reports, chapters from published books, webpages or websites, Images, illustrations, and maps are the ones that are to be mentioned as the references.
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