Strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)

This skill came naturally and improved with each consecutive document. In text, citations were just as important as the reference page, and were sometimes overlooked, since they often seem very intrusive. Producing a good flow of interesting writing and referenced ideas and quotes was often challenging, especially when we first began writing this semester. However, with time and practice our incorporation of the APA style became very fluid. I learned that you don’t need to always use quotation marks and ruin the flow of the document. Instead, you can paraphrase what you researched or read and just add a little citation to the end of your sentence or paragraph. This allows you to captivate your readers’ focus while still referencing that you got the information from somewhere else. Compared to MLA, it was nice knowing, that in APA, if we don’t explicitly use the text/research, we don’t have to reference it. Here is an example of how I used in-text citations to write a part of my Technical Description:

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