Referencing - Spot the Errors

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Referencing - Spot the Errors

Aim:
This exercise is about referencing, and involves correcting some APA-style references. For students taking the ELC's University English and English for Academic Purposes courses, this is based on the 'Using Sources' chapter of the book and will help students prepare for the academic writing assignment.

Instructions:
Fill in your personal details below to make the references, and then complete the exercise. Don't worry about privacy, your personal details will not be sent over the internet!

Language Analysis: see the Referencing Pages, or the Reference Machine.

Exercise

The following bibliographical references have mistakes. Correct them, then check your answers below. Ignore the lack of italics for the title.

Answers

1. Your answer was
Not done yet.
The correct answer was:

The mistake was the lack of brackets around the date. (Back to Q.1)

2. Your answer was
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The correct answer was:

The mistake is that the publisher's name and the place of publication are the wrong way round. The place of publication should be first, and the name of the publisher should be last. (Back to Q.2)

3. Your answer was
Not done yet.
The correct answer was:

The mistake is that only the first letter of paper and book titles should be capital letters. All the other words in the title should start with lower case letters, unless they are the name of a language; e.g. 'Chinese' or 'English'. Journal titles should have a capital letter at the start of each word, unless the word is an article or preposition. The first word of the journal title should always start with a capital letter. (Back to Q.3)

4. Your answer was
Not done yet.
The correct answer was:

The mistake is that the family name of the editor should come after his initials. (Back to Q.4)

5. Your answer was
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The correct answer was:

The mistake is that there are 2 editors, and the abbreviation for this is (Ed .), not (Ed.). (Back to Q.5)

6. Your answer was
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The correct answer was:

The mistake is that the month and the date are missing from this reference to a newspaper or magazine. (Back to Q.6)

7. Your answer was
Not done yet.
The correct answer was:

The mistake is that the day of the month in the date of retrieval from the Internet is missing. (Back to Q.7)

8. Your answer was
Not done yet.
The correct answer was:

The mistake is that the references are not in the right order. They should be in alphabetical order by the author's family name. (Back to Q.8)

Related pages: EAP pages | Online Exercises

Referencing Resources on the Internet

Referencing Pages - an overview of using sources and referencing
Reference Machine - a program to help you write references. You fill in the boxes with the author's name etc. and the computer formats the reference for you. You can use one of the following styles:
- APA style: for an in-text citation, a book, an article in a journal, a chapter in an edited volume, a newspaper or magazine article, or an Internet reference.
- Harvard style: for an in-text citation, a book, an article in a journal, a chapter in an edited volume, a newspaper or magazine article, or an Internet reference.
- Vancouver style: for a book, an article in a journal, a chapter in an edited volume, a newspaper or magazine article, or an Internet reference.
- IEEE style: for a book, a part or chapter in a book, an article in a journal, an article in an e-journal
Referencing Exercises: Spot the errors and correct them in in-text references and in bibliographical references.
Choosing whether to use a quotation, summary or paraphrase.
Secondary citation
Example academic essay with the quotations, summaries and paraphrases highlighted. It also contains in-text citations and references. The topic is how to design navigation for Internet pages.
List of referencing-related books in CILL.

Tips

Tip for Question 1:
It's a problem with the date. Back to the exercise