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Harmony Library: Citation Styles

Introduction to Citations

One major difference between high school and college is the need to write well informed, and well researched papers.  Within those papers students are required to use references to support their papers' arguments and/or research. When using these references, students must properly cite their resources within the paper, and create a reference, or work cited page at the end of a document.  Common styles include MLA, APA, and Chicago style citation formats.  There are several books that discuss and demonstrate proper citation styles, as well as online resources to help with citations, and we hope to highlight a few on this page below. 

IMPORTANT:It may not seem important to new college students to properly cite resources in a paper, however, improper citation or the lack of citations can lead instructors to give you very low marks, and possibly wonder if you plagiarized someone else's hard work to create your paper! 

FRCC Writing Center

The Writing Center
Mount Antero Building, Room 350
970-204-8112

The Writing Center provides students with all types and levels of tutorial writing assistance. Students are encouraged to use this support for any class with writing requirements, not just English courses.

The University of Purdue provides free online writing help through the Purdue Owl Online Writing Lab.  You will find various citation format guides, as well as many useful links relating to various forms of academic and professional writing.

MLA 9th Edition Citation

MLA style was created by the Modern Language Association of America. It is a set of rules for publications, including research papers. There are two parts to MLA: In-text citations and the Works Cited list. In MLA, you must "cite" sources that you have paraphrased, quoted or otherwise used to write your research paper. Cite your sources in two places:

  1. In the body of your paper where you add a brief in-text citation.
  2. In the Works Cited list at the end of your paper where you give more complete information for the source.

MLA 9th edition follows these 3 principles: 

  1. Cite simple traits shared by most works
  2. There is often more than one correct way to cite a source
  3. Make your citations useful to readers 

APA Citation

Chicago

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These tools can be helpful to save time creating citations. However, always double-check that the automated citations are correct!

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