Ace your assignment Citation and referencing
Chapter 9 addresses the issues of citing and referencing sources using the formatting guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA) in substantial detail. Here it is worth very briefly touching on some of the implications that these have in regard to plagiarism.
The sources that you draw on in informing your ideas should be cited using the format: Surname (date of publication), for example, Dereckson (2020), within the body of your essay. At the end of your essay, the reference section (arranged alphabetically by surname) should contain the full reference details, enabling your reader to locate that resource (Chapter 9 discusses these issues in more detail).
Where the phrases or sentences are used from a source, these should be given in quotation marks and you should cite the surname, year of publication and page, or pages, from which the quotation was taken (again, Chapter 9 discusses this in more detail).
It is important to realise that citing sources is vitally important throughout your essay, but that doing so doesn’t then license you to give up thinking, letting your essay be carried by extensive (cited) quotations. While there is little of the deception usually associated with plagiarism in essays that do this, they are still over-reliant on the thinking of others. Do take into account immediate guidance from those involved in setting your assignment but, in general, quotes should be used to support your intelligent engagement with the essay, not replace it.
The active-engagement approach to locating and utilising sources
What am I trying to do in my essay?
Before we turn to sources, let’s turn to the essay title itself. Thinking about the essay title will guide us as to the sorts of things we need to do in the essay. This will give us a much better sense as to how we can actively use the sources – as resources – in our essay. If we don’t do this, we are in danger of being too passive, waiting to get a sense of what to write entirely from what we read, and we will never reach anything like our full potential. When we have an essay title we need to Stop, Look and Think.
Stop Read the title carefully
If you do not stop, you are treating the essay like a Wikipedia entry – you see the trigger name or idea and immediately reference ‘the’ material that matches so that you can write ‘the’ Piaget, Freud or Short-Term Memory essay. This is a terrible idea. The essay is almost never in the form: ‘Tell me whatever you know and can find out about Piaget’. Instead, it asks you to do something, something much more specific.
Look What is the title asking you to do?
Look really carefully at what the essay title is asking you to do (see Chapter 4 for more on how you can address the specific essay title). You may be asked to evaluate evidence or contrast ideas; the essay may be focused on a specific aspect of Piaget, Freud or Short-Term Memory; the essay might be framed in a highly specific way, asking you to explore a particular perspective on the target topic.
Think How do I best address the title?
Think not so much about ‘what is the answer’ as ‘how can I display relevant scholarly understanding and thinking regarding the issue(s) identified in the title’. The essay is your opportunity to display that depth of scholarly thinking – your reader wants to see the extent to which you serve up something subtle, knowing and sophisticated, rather than simply slop out the usual gruel. Think about the sorts of things you need to do for your specific essay title and the sorts of things you need to find out in order to do these things.
This Stop, Look and Think process is illustrated below.
Ace your assignment I is for index
We live in a world of i-prefaced words, but what about that amazingly useful but, widely neglected i, namely the index. Some digital search tools are addressed in more detail below but, for now, note that most academic books have not one, but two indexes (for both names and subjects). This means you can search for that psychologist whose work you were interested in, or that special topic – or you can really push the boat out and do both.
It is a real hassle for authors and publishers to compile carefully copy-edited indexes and they do it as some small but precious act of kindness for you. Why not accept their generous gift and save yourself many hours of flicking through texts, wondering if that key name or idea will pop up, and enter the wonderful world of indexes? It’s what Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Adam Dalgliesh would do – you should try it too.
Imagine the following essay title:
‘Critically evaluate the evidence for the multistore model of memory.’
Stop – this is not asking for whatever you know or what the textbook says about the multistore model of memory.
Look – the essay is particularly focused on an evaluation of the evidence regarding the multistore model. Although the essay refers to the evidence for the multistore model, as you are evaluating the evidence it would normally (though do be aware of specific tutor guidance) be appropriate to include evidence for and against.
Think – what do you need to do in this essay and what do you need to find out in order to do it?
What do you need to do? You need to demonstrate:
An understanding of what the Multi-Store Model is.
An awareness of empirical evidence relating to the Multi-Store Model.
A capacity to evaluate the empirical evidence relating to the Multi-Store Model.
A capacity to think about these issues from different viewpoints.
What do you need to find out in order to do this?
You need information that will help you to describe the Multi-Store Model.
You need information concerning the empirical evidence for the Multi-Store Model.
You need information that both supports the empirical evidence and criticises it – or identifies its shortcomings.
You need information concerning alternatives to the Multi-Store Model. These can be used to evaluate the Multi-Store Model, but care has to be taken to keep the focus on the Multi-Store Model itself.
Don’t let this active orientation to using sources as resources become oppressive. It can be fun. Get into detective mode. You are identifying just what it takes to provide a really strong answer to your specific essay title. The next part of the essay challenge is to locate the information and ideas that