Academic English 11
Hutchinson
Locate information
Begin with books and magazines. These are more
reliable sources than internet sites because
publishers have fact-checkers on staff who attempt
to validate information. This, of course, does not
mean that all information in books is correct!
Skim the sources that you have found to see if they
are suitable for your paper. If they provide
information that answers the questions you are to
answer in your paper, use the source.
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After you have decided to use a source,
make a source card. You will use this to
organize all the information that you gather
from the source.

Author’s name (last name, first name) or the editor’s
name (last name, first name)—if there is an editor, put
ed. after the name.
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Title of the work
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City of publication
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Publisher
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Copyright date—use the most recent
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Look at the following slides and then see how
I took down information to fill out the “Book
Source Handout.” This is how you are to fill
out all sources that are for books.

Author (last name, first name)
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Title of article in quotation marks
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Magazine title underlined (or in italics)
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Date of publication—day, month, year—or volume
number
Pages
After locating a site that contains information
about your author, the first thing you should
do with a web site is to decide if the
information is reliable.

Read the site to see if the information
repeated from your book sources is the same.
If there are discrepancies, it is more likely
that the problem is with the web site rather
than with the printed source.
Then, read the site to see if it has the
information that you need.
If it does, make a source card for the site.
Web Source Card
When you document sources from the World Wide Web,
your source cards should contain as many items from the
following list as are relevant and available:
•Name of the author, editor, compiler, or translator (if
available and relevant), alphabetized by last name and
followed by any appropriate abbreviations, such as ed., tr.
or comp.
•Title of a poem, short story, article, or other short work
within a scholarly project, database, or periodical, in
quotation marks
•Title of a book or magazine, italicized or
underlined
•Name of the editor, compiler, or translator of
a book (if applicable and if not cited earlier),
preceded by any appropriate abbreviation,
such as ed.
•Publication information for any print version
•Title of the scholarly project, database,
periodical, or professional or personal site
(italicized or underlined), or, for a professional
or personal site with no title, a description
such as home page
•Name of the editor of a scholarly project or database (if
known)
•Version number (if not part of the title) or, for a journal,
the volume, issue, or other identifying number
•Date of electronic publication or posting of latest update,
whichever is most recent (if known)
•Name of any institution or organization sponsoring or
associated with the Web site
•Date you accessed the source
•URL (in angle brackets)
Although no single entry will contain all twelve items of
information, all Works Cited entries for Web sources contain
the following basic information:
Online document
Author's name (last name first). Document title. Date
of Internet publication. Date of access <URL>.

The web site citation machine helps generate
source information. You are free to use it to
create your source cards.

Most of the sources you should use for this
paper will come from the subscriptions that
our school system has for online documents.
Go to bvps.org and click on “For Students”
tab, and then click on “Online Subscriptions”
in the left-hand column. This will take you to
the set of subscriptions that our school
system has.

Look at the following document. I went to
the ProQuest database to find it. CLICK HERE.

Then, look at the sample I filled out for this
article. You are to find an article about your
author from one of the databases and fill out
the handout based on this example.

Go to citationmachine.net and fill in the
information for your book source, your article from
a book source and your online subscription source.
Make sure to use MLA format and click “More”
under the MLA dropdown menu. Use the handouts
you have already filled out to create three source
cards. You will need to fill in the page numbers for
the article from a book card. Then, hand in the
handouts and source cards for your first grade. See
the examples of source cards that follow.
Remember to give each source card a
different number. You will use this to
organize your cards by putting the
number for the source from which you get
information on each card on which you
take notes.
Source cards
__________________________________________________________The
Source Number Goes Here
_______________________________________________________________________________________
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Put the source information from citationmachine.net in the center of the card.
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See the following example cards.
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
The following examples of source cards were
created from the example worksheet
handouts. I used citationmachine.net to
create the sources.
Book Source Card Example
1
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Weaver, Constance. Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions.
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Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1979. Print.
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Article in Edited Anthology Source Card Example
2
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Hillocks, Jr, George. "Middle and High School Composition." Research on
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change. Ed. Peter
______________________________________________________________________________________
Smagorinsky. New York: Teacher's College Press, 2006, 48-77. Print.
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On Line Subscription Service Source Card
Example
3
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Pfaffinger, Katheryn A. “Research Paper Baby Steps.” English Journal 95.4
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2006. 75-77. Web. 22 Sep 2009. http://proquest.umi.com ProQuest.
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Web Page Card Example
4
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"Writing: Research reports, reviews, etc.." National Literacy Council. Web.
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07-Oct-2008. 14 Oct 2008.
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<http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/Research/writingreviews.html - WritingNext >.
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Print Magazine Source Card
Example
5
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Stone, M. "Bonehead English." Time 11 Nov 1974: 106. Print.
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