What three pieces of information should be stated to make an effective oral citation?

Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll tell you how I use Google Sheets to organize my citations and sources for papers and research projects.

I'm in my first year of graduate school and we do a lot of writing. References and citations are very important, as they are for any discipline. I supposed if I was writing a dissertation with a hundred citations, I would feel the need to pay for and learn a whole complicated citation software, but since I'm not, I prefer to use tools that I already use and know well. AND despite the fact I'm not writing a dissertation, I have written some papers that have had over 25 sources, so I do need SOME kind of system to organize and manage my citations.

I started out, as most people do, with kind of a hodge-podge system of just cutting and pasting URLs from the Internet and sticking them at the bottom of the Word document of the paper. Or, if I'm doing research, I'd just copy and paste URLs with maybe some quotes from the study or article. The problem was, if I had multiple quotes, I couldn't organize them by topic for fear of losing the reference link, or I'd have to duplicate the URL multiple times. Plus, scrolling down to check these references was annoying. I needed a better, less messy system.

Here's what I do now. For each research project or paper, I create a new Google Sheets spreadsheet for references. You could easily do this in any spreadsheet program. I name it something like Class name - Project name - Citations and Quotes. Let's use a research project that I just did for my Policy class as an example. My spreadsheet name is "Policy - Ex-Felon Voting Rights Citations and Quotes." Then -- I make 2 tabs. The first tab is called Quotes, the second is Sources. I'm going to put a sample of this Citation Spreadsheet up on my Google Drive to share with you. To use it, just follow the link that I will provide in the notes section, make a copy into your own Drive, and then use it or modify it as you see fit.

Sample Google Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PaQbDLrTFptlZAlarTkdj_syYBxs1zUaqqXulF1e11A/edit?usp=sharing

Back to the spreadsheet -- so, now as I'm doing my research and reading a bunch of different articles -- in this case, mostly news articles and opinion pieces -- I starting finding quotes or statistics that help me to understand the issue or that I might want to use in my paper. So, I copy the quote and paste it into this first column. Okay -- the second column is a reference number. I'm going to want to remember where I got this quote from -- so go to the article and copy the URL or website address. I note some basics about the source and what the article is about -- in this case it's an Editorial from The Washington Post Editorial Board. Now I go into the Sources tab paste the URL under website address, note some basics about the article -- more for my own recall ability than anything else, and I number it -- #1. Now, I'm going to have a bunch of other articles to put in here, so I might as well go ahead and fill in these numbers, 1 to 10. Okay, back to the Quotes tab, I'm going to indicate that this quote came from article #1. Now, I can paste several quotes from the same article, I just need to indicate where they came from. So, here is my completed spreadsheet for this research project. I have 13 sources and 38 quotes. I obviously did not use all of those in my paper, but they helped to shape my understanding of the topic and served as a repository for the quotes and statistics that I DID end up using.

Just a quick note -- because of the nature of this research project, most of my sources were articles about current events, but this system also works great for scholarly research since so much is accessible on the Internet these days through your academic institution's research portal. I also use this system to capture quotes from books. Check out my video on exporting quotes from Kindle books into a spreadsheet such as this.

There are two things that I find really helpful about this system:

1) Easy to categorize - Because each quote has its own line, you can tag each quote with a theme or category. For example, in this column, I'm going to put in the main reasoning that states use to disenfranchise ex-offenders. There are a handful: safety, punishment, violation of social contract, political ideology, race etc. Not every quote is going to get a tag, but I can tag all of the ones that apply and then I can sort by this column. That way, if this is how I've decided to structure my paper, in this case -- by state rationale, I have quotes that are all nicely grouped together and ready to use for each topic. The second thing, is that this system makes it

2) Easy to cite while drafting - So, I'm writing my paper and I want to use a good statistic. Here's one: "McAuliffe's order affected 200,000 people in a state where 3.9 million people voted in the 2012 presidential election." So, I go ahead and quote this in my paper. Now, I don't want to slow down my writing process do the whole citation now (for me, that is an entirely different thinking process), so when I'm drafting, I just put the reference number in parenthesis right behind the quote. Like this (4). Then, once I've drafted and edited the paper, I go back in looking for reference numbers and replace them with proper citations. This is easy to do since I have a nice centralized place where I've gathered all of the source website information.

This system has worked well for me. Let me know what you think! Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

Like papers and essays, citations are critical components of most speeches. Any time you reference someone else’s thoughts, ideas, or words, you must give them credit in order to avoid plagiarism. Using oral citations in a presentation helps build your credibility as a speaker, provides your audience with a source, and demonstrates that your information is reputable and can be fact-checked.

The good news about oral citations is that they are usually simpler than written citations, which follow strict standards such as APA or MLA style. There usually are not firm rules about what must be included in an oral citation. In general, speakers will often include information about:

Author(s): use last names only unless the full name is recognizable (e.g., Oprah Winfrey)

Title: titles are often not vital to a citation but use it if it is catchy or particularly relevant

Publication: it is vital that the publication, or where the information comes from, is cited

Date: dates are crucial to data like statistics that change over time

Just as there are no firm rules about what is included in an oral citation, there are also no firm rules about what an oral citation should sound like. One clear approach is simply saying “According to…” before providing the citation. For example, an appropriate citation might sound like:

“According to a 2020 article in the Journal of Learning, 75% of students dislike public speaking.”

However, the over-use of any citation style can become monotonous. So, be sure to use some variety when you signal that you are providing a citation. Examples might include:

“In a 2020 report from the Journal of Learning, 75% of students dislike public speaking.”

“A 2020 study from the Journal of Learning notes that 75% of students dislike public speaking.”

“The Journal of Learning reported in 2020 that 75% of students dislike public speaking.”

“Findings from a 2020 study in the Journal of Learning states 75% of students dislike public speaking.”

Use an oral citation whenever you are providing information that you feel is likely new to your audience. Statistics, quotations, study results, specific opinions, and expert testimony likely need to be cited.

There are a variety of options when placing a citation in relation to its corresponding information. These can be used interchangeably throughout your speech. Realize that you can insert the citation either before, during, or after the information being referenced. Examples include:

Beginning of sentence: “According to a 2020 article in the Journal of Learning, 75% of students dislike public speaking.”

Middle of sentence: “75% of students, according to a 2020 Journal of Learning article, dislike public speaking.”

End of sentence: “75% of students dislike public speaking, according to a 2020 article in the Journal of Learning.”

The Key Ideas to Remember are:

At least, be sure to include the source/publication and date of the information in a citation
Be sure to clearly signal your citation using “According to,” or another similar phrase
Use citations when needed—if you are unsure if a citation is needed, be safe and cite
You can include the citation before, during, or just after the information—but be certain to cite as you go and do not hold your citation(s) until the end of a section or entire speech