How to Reference in Academic Writing

Many students treat referencing and citation as an add-on activity. It’s not. In many ways, it is a crucial aspect of academic work. More than training you in the proper manner of giving credit where it is due, it helps you both develop your mind critically and evaluate sources in a more rigorous manner.

Besides, adding references to your writing makes it clearer and reliable when your audiences are reading your work. It also acts as an evidences or source of information about the statements or arguments that you implement in your writing.

When you receive an academic writing task from your class or school, you usually dig for more information to help you support and define your answers writing in the right way. But there are instances where some students tend to copy and paste someone’s work over the internet and making it as their own work before submitting their writing task.

This can be so dangerous since it is illegal to copy someone’s work and to write duplicate contents. This will only charge you by committing plagiarism.

Basically, when you are required to write down your own ideas or opinions provided with real facts to support your statements, you can quote a reliable source or place these sources in the reference section to give credit acknowledge their contribution to support your statements.

Do you notice how books, magazines, newspapers and other reading materials include references as their sources of information? That’s what it signifies for and you are obliged to follow that rule correctly to make your writing effective and reliable.

Knowing how to write references in your academic writing is you duty as a student writer. It isn’t that hard but you need to be precise about the sources that you include.

There are important ways on how and when to write references. Also, you have to be careful enough with what you will include in your sources of information. Below includes answers to your question about how to include reference in academic writing.

The work of referencing should begin as soon as you start taking notes from a source. Get into the habit of taking down details about sources at the same time you take useful notes from them. While you can always leave digging up about the original source later, you’re more likely to misplace it or forget about it going this route.

Here are a few other useful pieces of advice:

– Follow the prescribed standard as outlined in your class brief. If there is none, use standing conventions in your field of discipline.

– Put yourself in the readers’ shoes when you write your references. Can they understand where an information is sourced based on what you’ve done? Will they able to trace the original material easily using your writing?

– Be consistent. Include the same details among all the entries in your citation page. If you need help ensuring this, you can use a bibliography writing software.

– Use a style writing software to ensure adherence to the conventions you’re trying to follow.

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Category: Writing
Keywords: academic writing, report writing, reports

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