Citation Guidelines for This Class

Because the publication you are doing for this class is both academic writing and published on the web for a broader audience, you need to be able to both fulfill the requirements of academic citation for your sources and take advantage of the affordances of the medium of web publishing. For most purposes, these dual tasks shouldn’t really be all that complicated — though if you find yourself in a quandary about how to meet them both, please do either ask me for guidance or visit the Writing Center.

MLA Style

Your writing should basically follow the MLA guidelines for citation. You can ignore most of the general stylistic guidelines about margins, fonts, headers, and so on that are really meant to address formatting of the printed sheet. When you are citing sources from print texts, you should follow the MLA in-text citation rules but when you’re citing on-line sources, use internal links instead.

Examples

For example, in the course description published on the main page of this site, I quote from the NYT review of Darnielle’s novel:

We will read John Darnielle’s novel Wolf in White Van, which is “about alienation and despair and the search for meaning, which [the protagonist] finds in a postapocalyptic role-playing game he invents, turns into a business and administers in analog fashion, by exchanging letters with its players” (Garner).

And then at the bottom of that page, I’ve got a Work Cited section:

Work Cited

Garner, Dwight. “‘Wolf in White Van,’ John Darnielle’s Novel.The New York Times 25 Sept. 2014. NYTimes.com. Web. 29 Sept. 2015.

Or, in this post I’ve quoted from Ian Bogost:

In “Empathy,” Bogost focuses on games that operationalize weakness, noting that “Critics might argue that frail situations are not fun. Feeble characters do not wear shoes anyone wants to wear. And that may be true. But when it comes to the world we inhabit today, it is the vulnerable […] who deserve our empathy” (24).

And:

Work Cited
Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota P, 2011. Print.

Whenever you are relying on someone else’s words or ideas, you need to indicate such internally and with a works cited list, just like you would with any other class you’re taking.

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