How is citation more important while writing a quality essay?

Writing essays is one of the most significant parts of your academic life. For more than 60% of students, it is quite a daunting task as it can affect your grades directly. There are certain qualities that you need to inculcate in your writings. Some of these qualities are consistent sentences, coherence, correctness, and citations. Many students often doubt the importance of Citations while writing essays and research papers but, they are undoubtedly one of the vital things that can add value to your writings.

References help the reader identify the theories, analyses, comparisons, and evaluations relevant to the topic of your essay. Moreover, Citations also enable you to bring reliability and relevance to the content that you write. It also justifies the research made by you while writing. Below are few points that will help you to make out the importance of references while working on essays:-

• It helps to provide credibility to your writings.
• It acts as a tool to check the facts mentioned in your essays
• They help to demonstrate your knowledge and research in a subject matter.
• It ensures credit to the original authors of the work included in citations.
• It prevents plagiarism in the content.

Significant elements of essay citations

There are different styles of citations that depend on the discipline that you choose for writing the essay. If you are doing academic writing, mostly the style to cite the references will be given by the instructor. Though the style can be different, there are some common elements like author name, titles of publications, date of publication, and page numbers vital for each citation style you choose. While doing your academic writing, you have to deal with two types of citation styles Modern language association style and the American psychological association style. These styles lay the guidelines for what punctuation or abbreviations are used in a parenthetical citation. If you feel difficulty while following these guidelines then it is wise to take essay writing help from a credible source.

Understanding the different styles of citations while writing essays

As mentioned earlier, you will encounter two types of styles to cite things in your essay writings during academia. You need to know the differences between MLA and APA styles to ensure that you choose the appropriate format to ensure the relevancy of your writing. You need to know about what punctuation or abbreviations are used in a parenthetical citation using both these formats. Let’s discuss bout both these formats one by one to make out the difference and relevance.

• Modern Language Association(MLA) Style – It applies to the writings related to literature, art, and theatre. Under this style, you need to include the last name of the author and page number from his publication that you are mentioning in support of your writing. Mention both authors if publications have two authors. If it has more than two authors, add the name of the first author followed by et al.
• American Psychological Association(APA) Style – APA is one of the most common styles to cite references in academic writing. Almost every university in the country prefers this style while assigning essay and research writing tasks. This format is suitable for the behavioral and social sciences and shares significant similarities with the MLA style. However, mention only the author’s name and year of publication while using APA style.

If you are mentioning quotes by the author, you can write the page numbers too. If you are doing an APA article review, citations help you to detect mistakes in your writings. It is also vital to know how to cite an abstract APA to mention short of a paragraph. An example of a rhetorical technique a candidate could use in an opening statement is APA citation in the text.