Acknowledging Sources

Acknowledging sources means providing written recognition* of any ideas that are used or adapted for students' work. WAB uses MLA citation style, which means:

• You need to provide the name of the original author and details of where you found the information at the end in your Works Cited list.

• You need to acknowledge sources within the body of a work in parentheses.

Your teachers will have the librarian in class to explain the details about citing sources. Or use the MLA pathfinder.

The only exception is "common knowledge." Everyone knows, for example, that Columbus "discovered" America, that Paris is the capital of France, and that China is a communist country. Those facts are considered common knowledge, and would not need to be cited.

*'Referencing', 'citing' and 'attribution' are terms often used to refer to the acknowledgement of sources.

Ethical or not?

You are working on a paper for your history class. You find information from several sources: in books, journal articles, and online. When using your sources, you forget which information came from which source, You decide as long as you cite all the sources, it doesn't really matter where they came from and you will just do your best and hope they're close.