When should you include oral citations in a speech?

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!

General Tips:

• Tell the audience your source before you use the information (the opposite of in-text citations).
• Do not say, “quote, unquote” when you offer a direct quotation. Use brief pauses instead.
• Provide enough information about each source so that your audience could, with a little effort, find them. This should include the author(s) name, a brief explanation of their credentials, the title of the work, and publication date.
  •  “In the 1979 edition of The Elements of Style, renowned grammarians and composition stylists Strunk and White encourage writers to ‘make every word tell.’”
• If your source is unknown to your audience, provide enough information about your source for the audience to perceive them as credible. Typically we provide this credentialing of the source by stating the source’s qualifications to discuss the topic.
  • “Dr. Derek Bok, the President Emeritus of Harvard University and the author of The Politics of Happiness argues that the American government should design policies to enhance the happiness of its citizens.”
• Provide a caption citation for all direct quotations and /or relevant images on your PowerPoint slides.

Direct Quotations:

• These should be acknowledged in your speech or presentation either as “And I quote…” or “As [the source] put it…”

Book:

Include title and author: “According to April Jones, author of Readings on Gender…”

Periodical/Magazine:

• Include title and date: “Time, March 28, 2005, explains…” or “The New York Times, June 5, 2006, explained it this way…”

Journal:

• Include journal title, date, and author: “Morgan Smith writes in the Fall 2005 issue of Science…”

Website:

• For organizational or long-standing website, include title: “The center for Disease Control web site includes information…” For news or magazine websites, include title and date: “CNN.com, on March 28, 2005, states…” (Note: CNN is an exception to the “don’t use the address” rule because the site is known by that name.)

Interviews, lecture notes, or personal communication:

• Include name and credentials of source: “Alice Smith, professor of Economics at USM, had this to say about the growth plan…” or “According to junior Speech Communication major, Susan Wallace…”

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Oral citations help you demonstrate the reliability and accuracy of the information you share during your speech. They provide the audience with proof you've researched your topic and help you establish ethos, or credibility, with your audience. 

Oral citations should include the following information. 

Author

Who did you get the information from? Also share the author's credentials, to help establish this person or organization as a credible source. 

Example oral book citation: In their 2007 book, Made to Stick, researchers Chip and Dan Heath identify six principles that help people remember information. 

Title

Where did the information come from? This could be a book, magazine, academic journal article, website, interview, etc. 

Example oral article citation: According to Bruce Bower's 2005 article in Science News, about one-third of the 100 kids who participated in a research study by Marjorie Taylor at the University of Oregon in Eugene reported playing with imaginary friends. 

In most cases, oral citations require only the journal or website name. However, if you have used multiple sources from the same journal, also cite the article title.

Example oral website citation, when multiple articles from the same site are used: In a quote from his August 4, 2017 aeon.co opinion article, "Why vegetarians should be prepared to bend their own rules," Alberto Guibilini, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, argues that, "if people perceive vegetarianism as a position that allows for no exception, they are probably less likely to become vegetarian."

Date

When was the information published? For websites that don't identify a date, say the date the site was last updated or the date you accessed the site. 

Example citation for an interview: In an interview I conducted for this speech on September 1, 2017, Professor of Marketing Maria Jones, said she teaches ethics in her classes by introducing students to different professional codes of ethics and then asking students to use these codes to analyze different real-life scenarios.