APA

6 APA Citations
For this assignment, you are beginning to bring together relevant, scholarly, secondary sources for your major project. 

By “relevant,” I mean that the sources will contribute to the knowledge YOU are creating with your major project.
By “scholarly,” I mean that these sources must be deemed credible by experts in the field (not just Wikipedia or random thoughts in blog posts, for instance).
By “secondary sources,” I mean that these are published articles already in existence that touch on your research topic and/or frameworks in some way. They help you understand your research topic

These are not the study-subject of your literacy research
They are about the study-subject of your literacy research

You will later be collecting and analyzing primary sources: The literacy artifacts or events you will analyze for your major research project.

I need to be clear: That is NOT the purpose of this assignment.

Readings of your choice must be scholarly articles. I very much prefer that you use 1) Library database articlesLinks to an external site., or 2) StylusLinks to an external site. articlesLinks to an external site..  However, some very credible and relevant .edu, .com, or .gov web sources may be permissible.
 Best Practice: Create a Citation Repository

Beginning with this assignment, open and save a new Word doc separate from your other course work.

Use this doc for:

1) Creating citations for your sources as you find them, 
2) Saving links to helpful webpages before you close the browser window (for electronic sources),
3) Copying and any pasting quotes you may decide to use later in your writing (include page number) 

This allows you to find and cite a bunch of sources very quickly without losing a source you may need later and without overwhelming your mind or bandwidth. 

Locate a number of promising articles based on their title and synopsis or abstract,

Download the PDFs before reading them into a marked folder, and then sort through them for which articles best suit your purposes.
To save even more time, don’t worry about editing the citations for accuracy, formatting, etc., until you have a final reference list. You may end up not using many of them as you locate more fitting sources.

Here are some more pro-tips for citations most teachers won’t tell you about. 
 CHEAT CODES
Because citations are formulaic, they are a genre that repeats with very little variation (if they are accurate). Therefore, once you (or anyone) has cited something correctly once, the hard work has been done–and you just have to check it against a resource for accuracy. 
Here are 4 resources that will do most of the citation work for you:

The Library Database (Use this first)

When you access an article in the database, you will notice a button at the top of the new Primo task menu that says “citation.” This button will cite articles in a variety of formats, including APA.
NOTE: This new tool appears to be much better than previous versions, but it is still likely to get capitalization wrong and will sometimes have other minor issues such as dates or the inclusion of the full first name. 

Citation Generators (Use this for additional Web sources)

Citation generators such as Citation Machine (Links to an external site.) or EasyBib (Links to an external site.) will also create citations for you. 
To use these resources, you will still need to be able to identify the major characteristics of your source material and check against other resources for accuracy. The generators are not smart.

Previously Published Works (Use this when you find one very useful article which sites other useful articles)

Shhh!!! This is a super-pro-secret time saver. If you find one great source, you will often find others in its references–and bonus: They’re already cited for you! (Check that it’s APA).
Also, for difficult secondary sources, a search of your source title in Google Scholar (Links to an external site.) will often find published works that have cited your source before. If you find a source that used APA, they have cited it for you, and you just have to, 

Recognize whether it is cited in APA and 
Check for accuracy

Previous Citations You and Your Peers have Created

For every annotation you and your peers have submitted thus far, you have submitted a citation.

Thus far, I have not noticed any perfect citations, but if you band together in your Group Me forums, you can construct and check your citations with each other, making this an easy task.

Remember these tips whenever citing sources, for this class or beyond.
 APA Sources Peer Review
Submit complete, correct APA citations for up to 3 theoretical-framework readings from this semester’s readings and at least 3 additional, relevant, and scholarly readings of your choice. 
Up to 3 Theoretical Frameworks
Remember, the “frameworks” readings are the articles we’ve read as a class which provide your project with focus and relevance. The four to choose from (cite no more than 3 here) are:

Rhetoric (Downs),
Literacy Sponsorship (Brandt),
Discourse Communities (Johns), and 
Language Diversity (your choice from Week 4).

At Least 3 Additional Sources

Your additional sources should provide some relevant information about your specific research topic. They help you (and us) understand why your research is important to your research population and/or Writing Studies as a topic of interest.
You may not have completely settled on a specific-enough research topic yet, and that’s okay. Finding what others in the field have said about your potential topic will help you narrow it down.
Go to StylusLinks to an external site. to see what other UCF students have published for inspiration. 

Peer Review
Once you have posted your citations, read over at least two of your classmates’ posts, and:

Help evaluate the usefulness of the articles they chose,
Give constructive advice about formatting of the citations, or
Suggest another article they might find useful that you found in your research.

Note: You are only required to post 6 citations now, but more will be required for the Scholarly Article. If you would like to get peer feedback (always helpful!), you may post more than six citations here.  
Writing is best done socially, so use your peer resources while you have them! 
Consult the following resources for citation help:

EasyWriter p. 168 (p. 269 in 6th ed.)
The [email protected] (Links to an external site.) or
The Writing CenterLinks to an external site.