The mechanics of writing are things that we teachers struggled to master as undergraduates and graduate students. The bibliography entry, with all the information required and all placed in the proper place, was a skill that we expected of ourselves. Beginning students at ASU acquire these same skills. Many of them forget. So, if you don't want to teach the basics all over again, point your students to some online tools. BibBuilder 1.3 allows the student to choose from the following types of publications and then fill in the blanks. When they hit the submit button, the proper MLA citation magically appears at the bottom of the page where they can copy and paste into their paper.
- Web Page: personal home page, online journal article, or other Internet resource. (Note: most web pages are not credible. Use a peer-reviewed academic journal article instead.)
- Article: an article from a journal, magazine, newspaper, etc.
- Book: an entire work (novel, play, long poem, biography, etc.), published separately.
- Selection: a work published in a collection.
You'll find a nice PowerPoint presentation, "I Found It on the Internet Teaching Students to Locate, Evaluate, and Cite Credible Online Sources" among the links at left.
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