Hello everyone:

This posting is a bit early because I had a graduate student who asked me a question today and I thought you might benefit from reading my answer.

Personally, I like students to introduce a quotation in their writing, rather than just dumping it into a paper. In this case, the student was writing an APA formatted essay and she wanted to know what I was looking for in an introduction that did not interrupt the flow of her paper. Here is how I replied:

As far as your in-text citations go, let’s pretend that you want to quote Tom Smith who wrote an online  article in 2015. There are no page numbers, but your quote (making sure it is introduced in your essay) would look like this in APA format:

Smith (2015) posits that “here is the quotation” (para. 5).

You will not interrupt the flow of the paper with this type of citation. You can say that Smith does the following, to break up the introductions a bit:

Smith (2015) argues

Smith (2015 contends

Smith (2015) maintains

Smith (2015) states

Now, you are just using different verbs here. Do not use all of them in one paragraph. Rather, since we know Smith is a male, you could just say something like the following, if you are still in the same paragraph but want to use more than one quote from him:

Additionally, he also argues that “here is the quotation” (para. 6).  (Note that we did not use the date here because we already have the 2015 date earlier in the paragraph.)

If you do not use his name in the sentence, your quote might look like the following:

It has been stated that “here is the quotation” (Smith, 2015, para. 7).

I hope this helps you write an in-text citation with an introduction for a quote that does not contain a page number. Yes, you really do need to count the paragraphs!

Best,

Dr. Sheri

Hello everyone:

How often do you think that an article starts on page one of a journal? It doesn’t. [There are all sorts of things that appear first, like the title page and Table of Contents, to name two.]

The surprising thing to me is how often students will cite page one as their go-to page for an in-text citation. Just this past week, I asked two different students to put page numbers with their direct quotes in two different papers and both students cited page one for all of their in-text citations for the entire document.

Did they think I didn’t notice??????? Come on, people. Your laziness or lack of intellectual integrity is showing! This told me that neither student read any further than the abstract, so it was impossible for them to have any depth of understanding of the article that followed.

Maybe you are rushed for time….I understand that, but I will mark you down for this type of thing, and I will make a note in my personal grade book that I will have to keep an eye on you for the rest of the term. That means everything you write for me will receive additional scrutiny.  Be forewarned.

What is the stupidest thing a friend of yours has done academically? I would love to hear that story, to share with my readers.

Best,

Dr. Sheri