Tip of the Week #3 (TOTW#3): Cite your sources using Word 2008 (or 2007 if you are PC)
With many apologies to all the English teachers and librarians I have known, I have written the following:
Being a Math and Computer Science guy most of my life English was never my favorite subject. This despite the best efforts of my high school English teachers (sorry Mr. Hawkins). Along the same lines I also never cared much for completing citations on papers I wrote. It is not that I did not want to give credit to the people whose work I used, I just could never wrap my brain around all the precise rules that were required. You need a college degree to understand all of the nuances surrounding citing. If I could have just wrote:
“I got this quote from Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat”
I would have had no problems. But the whole convention just seemed so confusing to me. First I had to decide APA, MLA, Chicago or other (Even the people who came up with these systems couldn’t agree on conventions). Then I had to figure out what kind of media I got my source from; Book, Newspaper, Periodical, Internet, and the list goes on and on.
I don’t mean to undermine citing sources, as I said I believe crediting your work is extremely important, I just never got it.
So you can imagine how happy I was a few years back when I found an online resource that would do the work for me. While there are plenty of them out there I discovered Citation machine (http://citationmachine.net/) and I was in heaven. Finally something that took all of the confusion out of the process for me.
Taking this one step further I then I discovered about a month or so ago that the newest version of Microsoft Word (2007 or 2008 depending on your platform) would do this for me without having to visit an Internet site. They now have a citation generator built into the software. GENIUS!! Where was this when I was growing up.
All you have to do is click on the citation tab in the Toolbox, pick the kind of format you need (APA, MLA, etc.), pick the media you need (book, periodical, etc.) and it shows you all the fields you need to populate. After you have inputted the information Word then adds it to your list of citations. Every time need to cite that source you simply chose it from the list and Word automatically inserts the in text citation and starts to build your Works Cited page in the background. When you are finished writing your paper you simply tell word – Hey, I’m finished, can you spit out that Works Cited page now. It really couldn’t be easier. And as a Math and Computer Science guy I don’t think I will ever be frustrated by citing my sources again.
Isn’t it great when technology takes a task that caused you headaches (not to mention several 1/2 grade markdowns for forgetting the proper punctuation) and makes it a transparent piece to what I already do. That is the exciting part of integrating technology. Not forcing a technology into a situation where it may or may not fit, but finding ways where technology can make the tasks we currently struggle with easier and better than they once were.
Tags: APA, Chicago, citations, citing sources, Microsoft, MLA, Office, Word, Works Cited
