Writing that paper with plenty of references

Grading final papers when I could be fishing.

I am going to tell you a secret about writing papers and I will deny and claim my facebook was hacked if you tell your teacher Reverend Roy said to write a paper this way.

I am a hard nose when it comes to research papers, college research papers. I wonder what that high school teacher would say now? Oh boy, I looked back at a masters thesis and, oh, back to my position on papers.

College papers are not your high school paper, and if you are writing at a graduate level? (there is a reason it is called graduate school)

Students like to exclusively use the text book or wiki. No. I read the text book and I lecture via the text book so I do not want to read references from the text book.

Wikipedia is fun but reference it and there is no amount of extra credit to bounce back to a functional grade.

Now the secret, notice the foot notes and bibliography in the text book? Those are your reference points, your sources. Cross reference and verify the source. Of course I might have that book and will verify.

Wikipedia, Ok, I look for published books on the subject or peer reviewed papers so the wiki does not fit that category at all. However, wiki also has in many cases references or bibliography. That is where you will find your sources.

An example would be a research paper on the Beatles, the music group. Let me do a side note here. A student states he or she will write a paper on the Beatles. My question is what is your specific topic you will focus on regarding the Beatles? Volumes have been written on the Beatles and this is a 5-7 page paper (15-20 grad level). So the topic has to be specific to the class material.

Student comes back with "the british invasion" and now we continue.

In Wikipedia there are citations, notes, sources, and additional reading, In the page there are references to other wiki pages as well.

If I continually see a reference to Gould I might want to verify the source and validate the author.

There are plenty of resources if you know how to use them.

Just be sure to follow the APA, MLA, or other platform for in text references and bibliography.

happy writing