Homework 1

In reviewing the homework as it came in, I was a bit troubled with some of the work that was submitted. Because I want to make sure that everyone can master the basic skill of distinguishing between types of publications, I’m going to make a deal with you. Anyone who wants to revise what they submitted has until the beginning of class next Tuesday to do so. After class begins next Tuesday, I’ll grade what has been submitted. For those of you who submitted your work late for today (Thursday by 2:30 pm), I’ll be taking points off for being late and then grade what you have done by Tuesday.

I noticed that almost everyone made at least one mistake on the assignment by incorrectly identifying the type of source. Other people didn’t follow the instructions to have one of each kind:

  • magazine article
  • newspaper article
  • peer-reviewed article from a scholarly journal
  • book

Some folks didn’t include a sentence for an item telling me what kind of source it was or how it was connected to the ideas in Clay Shirky’s book.

Other folks had trouble with MLA-style citations. Here is advice you’ll want to look over and then keep in mind as you examine your citations:

  • you don’t need to put the URL for where the article was if you found it in a database
  • every initial letter in the title of a book or article should be in capitals (except for prepositions and conjunctions)
    • Incorrect
      • Doyle, William R. “The politics of public college tuition and state financial aid.” Journal Of Higher Education 83.5 (2012): 617-647. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.
      • Shirky, Clay. Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.
        • All words in the article title should be capitalized except for the prepositions (e.g., of) and conjunctions (e.g., and)
      • Doyle, William R. “The Politics Of Public College Tuition And State Financial Aid.” Journal Of Higher Education 83.5 (2012): 617-647. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.
      • Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008
        • Prepositions (e.g., of) and conjunctions (e.g., and) should never be capitalized
    • Correct
      • Doyle, William R. “The Politics of Public College Tuition and State Financial Aid.” Journal Of Higher Education 83.5 (2012): 617-647. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.
      • Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Print.
  • if you found the text of an article in a database, then the name of that database must be mentioned in your citation (as is the case with the citation above for an article found in Academic Search Complete)
  • book titles should always be in italics (this is true for your citations as well as for any sentences where you mention the title of a book) and never in quote marks

Here are some tips that may help with distinguishing between source types:

Peer-reviewed journal articles in scholarly journals

  • they are long; if you’ve have found something that is under 5 pages, it is probably not a peer-reviewed article
  • some articles in journals are longer than 5 pages (not by much) but aren’t peer-reviewed journal articles but instead write ups of conferences that people attended or are multi-authored articles where each author is engaged in a conversation with the others; a peer-reviewed article offers results on original research, not news
  • a book review in a scholarly journal is not a peer-reviewed journal article

Magazine articles

  • magazines are published on a weekly or monthly basis
  • they usually have one-word names or names that are just a few words
  • magazine articles can be anywhere from 1-20 pages, though they tend to average 2-3 pages
  • some magazines that publish really long articles are scholarly in nature but the articles are not peer-reviewed (that’s something that only scholarly journals do)

Newspaper articles

  • newspapers are usually published every day (so you browse of a list of issues for a newspaper, you’ll see a new issue for each day and if you browse a list of issues for a magazine you’ll see list of issues for each week or month)
  • newspapers are connected to a city or town in some way (if you don’t see the name of a town or city in the newspaper, go to the website of the source you found to see if it really looks like a newspaper)
  • to get a sense of what newspaper names look like, check out this list of newspapers that begin with the letter N (the website offers a directly of links to newspaper websites from around the world)

If you are uncertain about the source type you are dealing with, you can always go to the website for it, as that will offer details about the publication (look for an “about” or “about us” section). Once you see what other kinds of articles are published there, you can usually get a sense if what you are looking at is a magazine (because all the articles look like magazine articles) or a scholarly journal (because the website mentions how articles are peer-reviewed) or a newspaper (because the rest of the articles look like news articles).