Son of Citation Machine

Yesterday's post about using primary sources got me to thinking about copyright and proper citation. There are some good online tools to help students format citations. I remember how painful this used to be when I was in college in the pre-computer dark ages. I held the writers manual in one hand as I carefully typed in, with one finger on my old manual Smith Corona, the sources for my bibliography. It was a royaly pain. When I told this story to my students I would always get the question,

"How old are Mr.G? You must be reallllllllly old!"

In recent years, I taught my students to use Son of Citation Machine. Every time I gave this lesson, I had at least one child who had another site they liked better. I let them use which ever one they wanted, as long as they used something. I did find that at certain times of the year, one site might get bogged down with high traffic. So, it might be handy to have a few other urls of similar sites available for your students. Or to the utter dismay of your class, a book or handout with the proper formatting.

"This ain't no English class. This is a computer class Mr. G. Why do we have to look at a book?"



The two screenshot shown here are the interface and the resulting citation based on the Son of Citation for a web page MLA style.

[Screenshots: Warlick, David. "Son of Citation Machine." Landmarks Son of Citation Machine. 2006. The Landmark Project. 7 Sep 2007 .]