Applying Your Skills
FINDING INFORMATION AND CITING SOURCES
For many college writing assignments, you’ll need to find information in various sources and accurately cite those sources. This activity gives you practice developing these skills.
Identify a topic you find interesting or even controversial. For help, type “controversial essay topics” into your Web browser.
Locate four sources of information related to your topic. For example, sources may include books, magazine or newspaper articles, research articles from scholarly journals, and Web documents or reports.
Provide citations for the information sources you found. Depending on your instructor’s preference, use either MLA (Modern Language Association) or APA (American Psychological Association) style to cite each source. If you need help in citing a particular type of source, consult one of the many free online tutorials or contact your school’s library or writing center.
For example, let’s say you chose the topic “Should Performance-Enhancing Drugs Be Accepted in Sports?” You identify as useful resources the book Steroids: A New Look at Performance-Enhancing Drugs by Rob Beamish and the newspaper article “There Are No Sound Moral Arguments against Performance-Enhancing Drugs” by Chuck Klosterman. Your instructor requires APA style for citations, so you cite these sources as follows:
Beamish, R. (2011). Steroids: A new look at performance-enhancing drugs. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Klosterman, C. (2013, August 30). There are no sound moral arguments against performance-enhancing drugs. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com
252