Citing Your Sources
Every semester (with students from 7th grade all the way through college English courses I've taught), I look at Works Cited pages and notice the same type of errors over and over again. This page will help you avoid some of those mistakes.
Before moving on you may want to take a look at Research Resource: Citing Your Work section.
I'll show the most common mistakes and how to fix them, but the number one way to avoid them is to look at an example that is cited properly and copy that! Substitiute the information in the correct citation with information from your own.
Mistake #1: The Works Cited page gets its own page! Don't just add it to the next line of your paper.
Mistake #2: If you just give a link to the website you used you are not citing it properly. I see this one more often than any of the others. I look at a Works Cited page and all I see are a list of links. This is just about the worst thing an instructor can see.
Mistake #3: The formatting of the citation is not correct. You may have all of the correct information in the proper order, but formatting matters and you'll want to make sure it is displayed properly.
For example...
Fila, Jon. Indent Extra Lines When Your Cited Work Takes Up More Than One
Line. 1. Minneapolis, MN: Book Publishing Company for How Your Citations
Should Look, 2006.
Isn't good enough. Everything beyond the first line should be indented. This makes the author stand out so that citations are easy to find in a list. (Citations should be listed in alphabetical order.)
it should look like this:
For an example of what a Works Cited page should look like you should review this page. If you need more information you can ask your questions in the Help Forum.
Sometimes it can be difficult to get the 2nd (or 3rd, or 4th) line to indent properly. Here's what you need to do: