Need Citation Help?

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Many of our Writing Center clients come in with questions on how to properly cite their sources. We love talking with you about these issues, but there are also lots of other great resources right here in ZSR.

ZSR Citation Workshops

Zotero: Students often use web-based tools like EasyBib or Citation Machine to generate citations. Now, Zotero provides both students and faculty with an easy-to-use tool for managing sources and creating citations in a wide variety of citation styles! We have Zotero workshops on weekdays and weekends in order to meet the needs of both students and faculty interested in learning to use this program to organize research and streamline the citation process. Click here for a list of Zotero workshops.

The RIGHT Way to CITE: Do you need help need help with parenthetical citations or footnotes? This one-hour workshop will take students through the basics of both MLA and APA citation formats. We will cover in-text citation and Bibliography/Works Cited formats. Source management strategies will also be covered. Designed for students at any stage of research to help make those citations easy peasy! Click here for a list of workshops.

MLA

Need to know about the new MLA updates? ZSR has you covered there too!

Online Resources

The ZSR website has lots of different guides and resources to help you with APA, MLA, and others!

Need more help?

Did you know you can chat with a librarian, email them, text them, or even set up a personal research session? Well you can!

Invitation and Conversation: The Value of Quotation

In a piece at the Bending Genre blog, essayist Patrick Madden discusses the value of quoting others in your work. His post focuses primarily on the uses of quotation in essay and creative nonfiction writing, but his thoughts apply equally well to the way that quotation can and should work in academic writing:

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 The practice of quoting wiser others is engrained in our consciousness from an early age, when we learn, essentially, that our own thoughts are worthless unless they have a point, and our points are invalid unless we back them up with proof from reputable sources. It’s no wonder that, apart from our dutiful classwork, we take a strong disliking to quotation. But essayists use quotation in essays not as ethos-ballast to stabilize arguments nor as linguistic decoration from a lost/loved prose style, but as invitation and conversation as well as humble recognition that we are all influenced, we all think through others’ thoughts, whether we admit it or not.

Read the full piece here and let us know how you think about quotation via Twitter or our Facebook page!