1st February 2010 | The Urbanest Team | Comments [0]
Using Footnotes and a Bibliography while studying at University
For every essay and assignment you complete as a student, you will need to include a bibliography. Footnotes can help you make your writing clear, while still attributing the source of your information directly. Here are some great tips for students about using footnotes and bibliographies.
1 – Take all the details of every source you use for research
Whenever you refer to a book, a newspaper, magazine, or website, you should take down the full details of that source of information. Write the name of the book, the pages you referenced, the author/s of the book, year of publication, and publisher. You should include the date of publication of a newspaper or magazine and a volume issue if appropriate, as well as the article name and author details. Get as much detail on websites, including author details and publication dates, as you can.
2 – Build your bibliography as you go
As you study and take notes for your assignment, start building your bibliography. It is much easier if you can type the details directly into the computer on a bibliography page than to take hand written notes and later be looking for the slips of paper to complete your bibliography when the assignment is finished.
3 – Put your bibliography into some order
If you build your bibliography as you research, you may need to revise the order of the bibliography at the end. You can put the books, magazines, and websites into separate sections, use an alphabetical listing via book name or author name, or put the most important references first. Make it easy for the reader to find a source.
4 – Use footnotes to directly attribute quotes and ideas
Using footnotes in Word is easy. Simply click on Insert, then click on References, then click on Footnotes after the sentence where you want a footnote to appear. A number will appear in your text and a line with the corresponding number appears at the bottom of the page. You can use this space to list the source of your information.
5 – Make comments in footnotes
You can also use the footnotes to make comments or ‘asides’ on the information in the text of your assignment. However, be careful not to make the footnote too long. You do not want to have a whole page of footnotes for every page of text.
While you're a student studying at University these tips should help you to use footnotes and bibliographies effectively for your assignments.
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