John S. Ott
Department of History
Fall 2014
HST 300 – Historical Imagination

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Assignment overview

Citations, references, and bibliographies in scholarly writing generally follow, or are based on, one of three widely employed academic styles: APA (established by the American Psychological Association; it is widely used in courses in the Social Sciences); MLA (established by the Modern Language Association, widely used in Humanities courses, like English), and Chicago (maintained by the University of Chicago and following the format established by the University of Chicago Press; it is widely used in History texts and seminars).  It will save you a considerable amount of time and frustration if you learn the basic in-text and bibliographic format for one or more of these styles, since HST 405/407 (and possibly other courses as well) will require you to employ them.  I generally recommend that History majors/minors learn Chicago first and foremost, since it's the most common in our discipline, but I consider it most important that students simply learn one style and learn it well.

In reading academic books and monographs, you will find that most employ a variation on one or more of these three accepted styles.  Publishers generally establish their own in-house editorial guidelines, which can vary widely.

Happily, access to guidebooks for each of the styles is relatively straightfoward.

PSU subscribes to The Chicago Manual of Style Online (see Part 3.14). On-line reference guides for all three styles are available at the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL).  The Purdue OWL has a very handy side-by-side comparison chart of all three styles, available as a .pdf., for quick reference.  By the way, the OWL is also a terrific guide for improving your writing.  Check out their Writing Exercises page for help with all kinds of writing issues, from grammar to sentence style.

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Assignment guidelines

Part I.

For each of the three styles, please give examples of how you would cite the following types of sources in a footnote or in-text citation (depending on the style--footnote for Chicago, in-text citation for MLA and APA), and in their accepted bibliographical style (that is, for use in a "Works Cited" page). Thus, each type of source will have 2 citation formats (hence, 6 in all for each type of source: 2 each for APA, MLA, and Chicago styles).  It might be most helpful to do this as a table with six columns. Please pay special attention to punctuation, spacing, order of information, and use of abbreviations.

Types of source:


Part II.

Students are sometimes surprised to learn that one's choice of style determines certain principles of writing and citation.  Thus, each of the three styles has its own conventions for how to quote from sources, format pages, and so on.  For each of the three styles (APA, MLA, Chicago), please give an example of:

(1) how to cite and reference a direct quote in both in-text format and block format.
(2) What are the basic rules and parameters for quotations in each case (short, in-text quote and block-quote)?