How to Document Sources Using Traditional & MLA Methods

Series Summary

Teachers play an integral role in the development and education of children. Working in schools, academies or a community setting, a teacher's job focuses on facilitating student learning through lessons and demonstrations. High school teachers, in particular, play an important role in helping prepare students for college and jobs in the real world. All teachers, high school teachers included, face the difficult job of keeping students engaged and excited about learning. While education careers are quite difficult, for most teachers the benefit of shaping young minds far outweighs the challenges. In this free video on education, teacher Michael Walter Mitchell discusses several topics related to teaching English. Mitchell begins by explaining how to document sources using traditional and MLA methods, how to set the style for a speech, prepare a speech and write an essay. He also discusses how to grade with percentages, create a survey, teach basic conversational English and write college papers. Watch these free videos and learn more about teaching English today.

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Mitchell, and today, I'd like to explain how to document sources using traditional and MLA methods. When you write an essay or a research paper, especially at the university level, it's very, very important that you document sources. If you use information from an outside source other than your own personal experience, you must always document it or cite it in your paper or research. And if you use a source from outside your own personal experience, this is called plagiarism, and it's a very bad thing to do in a university paper. When you're documenting sources, you basically need to note either in a footnote or an endnote where you got this information. A footnote...this is a paper. If you have a quote in the body of your text, a footnote will be at the very end of this page on the same page where you have the quote. An endnote is normally the last page of the paper, and you would have a list of all of the quotes throughout the paper on one page. Either one is normally acceptable, and with the modern Word document programs, it will do it automatically for you in terms of page formatting. The only thing you need to remember is that for either, you need to normally put a number at the end of whatever you've quoted, and then the same number would be at the beginning of the line where you list the author and the publication where you got the source."