What kind of style???

I’ve always had some problems with citations! Writing references to our sources is supposed to be an easy task, something that we do without thinking because we have done it many times. Actually, writing references is far from an automatic activity for the majority of students! I think the problem is that every book we read uses a different style and as a consequence we tend to be a little confused. The two websites that Sarah mentions in E-tivity 6 are clear: each of them provides the basic guidelines for citing sources and offers some useful examples. We just have to choose which style we prefer and follow it. It is necessary to make an explicit choice because the two styles are quite different from each other: we can’t use both of them at the same time. For example, there are some differences concerning references to books. According to the APA style, it is better to use initials for the author’s names and italics for the title of the book. The year of publication is written immediately after the author’s name. On the contrary, in the format elaborated by MLA, the author’s name is not abbreviated, the title is underlined and the year of publication is put at the end, after the publisher. Moreover, I noticed another difference concerning in-text citations. If we use APA style, we need to specify the year of publication when we quote or paraphrase from another work, while, in the format by MLA, the year of publication is not required and the number of page is not preceded by “p.”
I think it’s really important to choose one style and use it in every academic paper we write. If we change the style every time according to the advice of the teacher we are writing for, we risk mixing different styles and we’ll never learn to make references properly. This is my case: for my BA thesis I used the style preferred by my supervisor, which was more similar to APA style than MLA style. However, there were some differences: for example, for the in-text citations I used to put the direct quotation between inverted commas and then the author’s surname, year of publication and number of page in brackets (Author, year of publication: n.page).
All things considered, I prefer APA style because it’s more similar to the style I used in the past. Thus, I’ll follow the guidelines provided by the website, I’ll memorize them and, in this way, I hope writing references will be easier for me!

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