Writing college papers?

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Hello everyone! I was just wondering a few things about writing college papers. I took all my Gordon Rule classes during high school through a dual enrollment program with the local community college so I shouldn't have to write all that many papers, but I'm just curious.

1) Does anyone have any good websites on how to cite things properly in a college paper? That would be much appreciated!

2) Does anyone have any good websites about what things should be cited? I don't plagarize I just want to be sure I cite everything necessary.

3) Can anyone recommend a good book or website on basic grammar rules? I'm a pretty good writer when it comes to research papers and whatnot but I'm afraid my grammar skills are not where they should be.

Thanks a ton in adavnce!

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Specializes in ICU.

Citations or references for nursing classes are usually in APA form (american psychological association). sociology, psych classes usually are also. English classes usually use MLA (I can't remember what it stands for). Make sure you ask your instructor what form they expect. If there was one thing I learned by the end of nursing school, it was APA format! If they require APA, you might want to consider getting the reference book.

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Specializes in ICU.

In terms of what should be cited? Anything that is not your own idea or your own words. You need to credit the original author for the work. As long as you cite the source, it is not plagarism.

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Specializes in Nursing Professional Development.

As a previous poster said, there is more than one system for doing citations. You will have to check with your instructor to find out which one they use. For nursing courses, the most common one is APA (American Psychological Association, as mentioned above). I'm pretty sure the MLA mentioned above is the Modern Language Association.

The APA manual includes a lot of grammar and word usage information as well as the proper format for citations and formating a paper. It may be all you need if that is what your school uses. If you are looking for a few other suggestions, I would suggest:

1. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.G. White. It's a classic now in its 4th edition.

2. Eats, Shoots & Leaves is an entertaining best seller on punctuation, believe it or not. It's full of fun examples on how improper punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence. It was written by Lynne Truss. Note the comma error in the title. The phrase was originally written to state the diet of a panda bear. With the comma inserted, it makes the poor panda bear a criminal who has a meal, shoots a gun and then leaves the scene.

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If you have to write in APA try out the website PERRLA.com. It has been a great help to me in my BSN program.

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Here is a site that I have used to write all of my papers the past two semesters. It shows APA and MLA.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

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Hello everyone! I was just wondering a few things about writing college papers. I took all my Gordon Rule classes during high school through a dual enrollment program with the local community college so I shouldn't have to write all that many papers, but I'm just curious.

1) Does anyone have any good websites on how to cite things properly in a college paper? That would be much appreciated!

2) Does anyone have any good websites about what things should be cited? I don't plagarize I just want to be sure I cite everything necessary.

3) Can anyone recommend a good book or website on basic grammar rules? I'm a pretty good writer when it comes to research papers and whatnot but I'm afraid my grammar skills are not where they should be.

Thanks a ton in adavnce!

Try NOODLETOOLS it helped me in 102

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

don't know where you got the idea that you won't be writing many papers in college. that's all we did in my bachelor's degree program! the higher you go in college, the more papers you write.

this website will properly format citations for you. all you have to do is input the data they ask for and it formats the correct citation for the type of resource you have specified. then, you just copy and paste the formatted information to your paper.

you cite references to give credit to the ideas of other writer's that are not your own.

in every class where we had to submit a formal paper, the professor or instructor gave us specific instructions on what format we were to use. in most cases, a nursing program is going to have all it's students use the same format (i.e. mla or apa style) for it's papers. i had instuctors that gave us pages of directions on how a particular paper was to be formatted.

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Specializes in Emergency, Trauma.

I'm back in school now and have had at least one paper to write for each class I've taken; all have required APA format and the instructors are pretty strict about it. At first, it took me longer to format my papers correctly than it did to write them. Several people suggested to me that I buy a program that will do this for you, which I did and I wish I had known I could do that earlier! I downloaded a program from styleease.com and it formats everything, inserts citations, does your reference page as you insert citations... I love it! There are several different companies who offer this as a download or a disc. I paid about $30 and it was worth every penny.

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Specializes in LTC.
Here is a site that I have used to write all of my papers the past two semesters. It shows APA and MLA.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

This is by far the best site I've found for citing material. I use it quite often.

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My school subscribes to a service called Noodlebib. It will actually write your works cited page for you. Look on your school library website under reference help and see if they have this service.

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