Introduction

Referencing is an essential skill that must be learned. I have never understood why some students feel the need or desire to plagiarize (i.e., intentionally or unintentionally use the ideas of someone else without giving them credit) when, in fact, I find citations a sign of good work.

Providing a reference tells me that you have identified information as so important that you wish to use it. You are directing the reader to an external source that is important enough to say “Hey, I thought this was a good point.” This tells me that you are thinking about the topic in a significant way — a way that is much more impressive than just writing down what “you” think.

Accordingly, footnotes (which appear at the bottom of the relevant page) or endnotes (which appear at the end of the essay) are not just about giving proper credit. They also reveal your own level of intellectual sophistication.

Footnotes and endnotes can be used for two different purposes:

1. To give the specific information regarding the resource you are citing
2. For commentary that does not fit in the main body of the paper but is still relevant and worth stating

For example, in a footnote, you might provide the entire passage that you quoted from, or you might offer a general editorial remark about the author or the source.

Citation Style Guides

Professional philosophers tend to use either the Chicago Manual of Style or the Modern Language Association (MLA) format for their referencing. Many instructors permit inclusion of reference citations within the body of the essay.

For example:

When speaking within the confines of philosophy of mind, Dualists are not, I repeat, not those who wake up at sunrise and try and shoot their opponent after ten paces—although some might wish this were true. (Kirby 63)

However, I personally find that in-text citations can interrupt the flow of the essay. If I am thinking about the author’s argument, inserting references can break the visual flow of the argument and, accordingly, my concentration. Also, if the author whom you are citing has more than one article published in the same year, this will cause confusion unless you now include part of the title in your citation (e.g., Sinnott, Mind: I Know I Left Mine Somewhere 223).

This, in my view, only makes the distraction more pronounced. Given that I often make use of footnotes for both commentary and referencing, I prefer to just use footnotes for everything — but this is merely a personal preference. Please check with your instructor to see what format he or she expects.

MLA Examples

Using footnotes or endnotes in MLA style is very easy. There are only four components:

1. Author
2. Title
3. Publication information
4. Page number(s)

The following are samples of the commonly used types of sources. Follow each example exactly (i.e., use italics, commas, etc. in the same way).

• Book
  • Ryan Coke. Metaphysicians. (Peirce-Horton Publishing, 2017), p. 210.

   

• Article in Anthology
  • Jane Grey. “Drinking Water Concerns.”Environmental Problems, edited by Martin Smith and Debra Hans, 3^rd ed., (Roughhat Sons and Daughters, 1999), p. 34.

   

• Article in Journal
  • Jason Jefferson. “Righting Wrongs with Revolutionary Science.” Philosophy and New Scientific Affairs, vol. 12, no. 1. (Jan.-Mar. 2007), p. 101.

   

• Further Citation of Same Author — Same Source
  • Coke. Metaphysicians. p. 212.

   

• Class Notes
  • Jeff McLaughlin. “Philosophy 1100.” 7 January 2018, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC. Lecture.

   

• Online References
  • Information is the same as above, with additional remarks. No page reference is required. Note that the first date below refers to when the article was posted or last updated (if known), and the second is when you visited the website.
  • Jeff McLaughlin. “How to Do Philosophy.” Why or Why Not, May 1999, http://www.whyorwhynot.ca. Accessed 12 June 2018.

   

• Bibliography
  • A bibliography is simply a list of works that you used. It is put after your essay or endnotes (when relevant). Put the author’s last name first and keep the information the same as above (but drop the parentheses and page references):
  • Knight, Storey. Epistemology and Personal Awareness. New Gem Press, 2013.

Other Citation Notes

Footnote or endnote citations or reference numbers are sequentially ordered: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. Numbers are also superscript (small numbers placed above the text line). You need a new number for each separate reference. Thus, even if you cite the same author and the same page three times, you will have a different number for each use.

Quotations

Long quotes must be separated from the body of your text, indented, and single-spaced. Quotation marks are not used in this case, and the passage is followed by a citation number.

For example:

According to the New York Tribune journalist Jay J. Lee:

In the summer of the last year of the Great War, men and women back home started to return to their normal lives. Yet the world was not the same place as it had been. There were no able bodies to help rebuild Europe but in the USA there was no shortage of men, just jobs.

If you wish to delete some of the quoted text because it is irrelevant, use three dots ( . . . ) to signify that text is deleted.

For example:

The original text:

She listed many household appliances including hot water tanks, dishwashers, clothes dryers, television sets that were considered expensive.

Your quotation:

“She listed many household appliances . . . that were considered expensive.”

If you need to add/change a word to clarify the meaning of the sentence, or capitalize or remove capitalization from the quote, use square brackets: [].

For example:

“[The child] listed many household appliances . . . that were considered expensive.

In the following case, the original sentence started with “She,” but it is now part of a new sentence:

Even though Sarah was still quite young, “[s]he [was able to list] many household appliances . . . that were considered [to be] expensive.

Please remember that you use e.g., (an abbreviation of the Latin “exempli gratia”) when you wish to give examples and i.e., (an abbreviation of the Latin “id est”) when you wish to rephrase or clarify the meaning of a term in other words.

For example:

“There are many expensive (i.e., cost over $400.00) household appliances, (e.g., television sets, hot water tanks, dishwashers).”

Avoiding “I Feel” and “I Think”

Never use “I feel” when you really mean to write “I think” or “I believe.” “I feel happy” is fine, but “I feel that truth is a correspondence of how the world really is with what the person is claiming” suggests that you have an intuition or a “gut reaction” about what truth is. You are not going to persuade anyone to accept your views based upon what YOU feel. Besides, feelings are just sensations…

In fact, try to avoid using “I think” entirely, since first person usage is often redundant. If you write “I think abortion is wrong,” this provides no more information to the reader than stating “Abortion is wrong.” The reader already knows that you think abortion is wrong, because you are the author of the essay! There is no need to remind them of this fact.

Moreover, dropping “I think” provides a subtle benefit to your argument. You are trying to persuade someone that abortion is wrong, not just that you believe that it is wrong. To do to the latter is to open yourself up to the obvious rebuttal that “what you write may lead you to believe abortion is wrong, but it sure doesn’t convince me.” Indeed, if I were to ask whether your statement was true or not, notice that the additional inclusion of “I think” changes what you originally intended.

You write “I think truth is achieved by correspondence with the way the world is.” Is this statement true or false? True, of course, because you are only telling me what you think. Whether truth is achieved by correspondence with the way the world is has not been determined.

Submitting Your Paper

Finally, have some respect when putting your presentation together. Do not just fold over the corner of your essay. Ask your instructor how they would like the submission. Do they want you to email it? If so, be sure they will be able to open the file. Buy a stapler tomorrow if you do not own one. Do not use that personalized letter paper covered in pink roses because “that’s all you had left.” Do not use odd-coloured ink or strange margins or font settings.

Not being professional about how your work looks indicates how much you care or do not care about what you are doing. Assuming that your instructor will even allow you to hand in work that looks unprofessional, I do not need to tell you how they will judge the level of respect that you are demonstrating to the material, the course, and to them.

Attribution

Unless otherwise noted, “How to Do Philosophy” in The Originals: Classic Readings in Western Philosophy by Jeff McLaughlin (2017) is adapted and used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.