Much of composition II has to do
with students demonstrating their skills in research and documentation. By
research, I simply mean locating scholarly sources, such as books and articles
published in peer-reviewed journals. Sometimes I will refer to these
publications as scholarly journals, academic journals, refereed journals, or
simply journals. This course has much less to do with training students to
locate sources from newspapers, magazines, websites, and other mainstream
sources, for they are not scholarly sources. Even so, in your final major
project, the research paper, you may use these types of non-scholarly sources
as additional sources, which means you may include them as sources beyond the
scholarly sources required for the research paper.
This lecture is largely unconcerned
with books, and will focus on journals. At the outset of these lecture
comments, I also mentioned documentation, which is defined as a parenthetical
citation and its corresponding works cited page citation; however, there is a
problem associated with the documentation of some journal articles, and the
purpose of this lecture is to define that problem and then explain how to avoid
it.
The problem stems from the fact that
when you research journal articles through Academic
Search Complete, PROQUEST, or any
of the Temple College Library databases, you will click on links to access
those journal articles, and the link you choose will determine the
display/print form in which you access the article. In most databases, the
links will read PDF Full Text and HTML Full Text or something very similar to
that. Use PDF
whenever possible, for the article will open up in Adobe Acrobat Reader, and it will be a
scanned image of the article’s pages as they originally appeared in the
journal.
If, for example, the article begins on page 151 and ends on
page 171, the in-text citations in your essay can document the actual page
numbers from the article because you will have accessed the article in its
originally published form. In other words, when you cite the original page
numbers from the journal, it is a useful form of documentation to your readers,
and that is the value of using PDF files.
However, if you access the article in HTML, it means that
the article has been converted to the equivalent of a webpage. When you print
the article in HTML form, your browser will number the pages for you. If the
article is ten pages long, the pagination will read as follows: page 1 of 10, page 2 of 10, and so on. This is not a useful form
of documentation to your readers.
Briefly stated, whenever you locate a source that you will
use in an assignment, you must then render some judgments about how to document
that source with parenthetical citations and works cited page citations;
whether the article is in PDF with the original page numbers from the journal
or HTML with no page numbers except the page numbers supplied by your browser
has an impact on your choice of the correct citation style.
There
are no shortcuts to negotiating the documentation of sources correctly. You
will simply have to spend serious time with the MLA Handbook.
After
you locate a source from a book, journal article, newspaper, magazine, website,
or other type of source, you are then making the determination about what type
of parenthetical citation and corresponding works cited page citation you
should use. Moreover, with regard to journal articles, you will choose your
citation styles based upon whether you have engaged the journal article as a
PDF or HTML source.
To
negotiate these decisions correctly, study chapters 5 and 6 of the MLA Handbook, and use the Smarthinking service
for assistance.
It
is difficult to imagine that students could earn an adequate grade in any given
assignment or overall in this course if they do not handle documentation skills
well. Remember that I expect at least the fundamentals of good documentation,
which means that parenthetical citations and works
cited page citations will be correct, as well as the formatting of your
assignments. Even
so, you may choose to demonstrate in your assignments as many skills from the MLA Handbook as you want to learn, which
will increase the chances of any given assignment receiving a higher grade.