The topic that Sarah and I decided to teach the class on are in text MLA citations. I struggled with this myself, so I thought it would be a good idea to learn more myself while also helping others who struggle. I believe I struggled with this so much because in high school they did not put as much pressure on in text citations. I also really wanted to choose this topic because in college properly citing sources is SO IMPORTANT. If a source is not cited plagiarism may be found which is a huge offense at any institution. It is good to get in the routine of easily citing correctly in order to avoid any issues when using other people’s ideas or words. To begin the lesson my partner and I decided to stress why it is so important to cite correctly. Some people may not realize how important it is so we decided to really focus on the idea of giving proper credit to the person who created the ideas. The first thing we state to the class is “MLA citations are used when directly quoting someone else’s work short or long, and paraphrasing someone else’s ideas. It is important to give credit to the person where the idea came from. Plagiarism is a huge deal everywhere in life especially in college. Even when paraphrasing if not properly cited, a student could be greatly punished for stealing the ideas of others. That is why it is very important to cite sources whenever someone else’s ideas are used”. This really helps the idea get across that citing is crucial. We then decided to go straight into the teaching. Since citations may vary depending on the circumstances we listed the three parts we were going to teach which was long quote, short quote, and omitting or adding words. When there is a long quote there must be an indent 1/2 inch from the left margin, and the citation which may be (Willis, 1) or Willis states “…” (1). When there is a short quote the in text citation is the same, but there is no indentation during the actual quote. Lastly when adding or omitting words in order to maintain a certain tense or taking out words to shorten a person would either use an ellipsis or [also]. After explaining everything my partner and I wanted to make our lesson as interesting as possible, so we wanted to actually include the class in the lesson. We decided the best way to do that is through examples. We decided to pick out examples from our own essays where we incorrectly and correctly cited the source. We are going to display these examples to the class, and they have to do a few things. The first thing that they have to do it determine if it is a correct or incorrect in text citation. If the citation is correct we will just go to the next example, but if it is incorrect the class must tell us what is wrong and how to fix the problem. This was important for us to do because it puts the class on the spot to see if they know how to correctly cite after we has showed them. This is the link to our docs which will be shared.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NYliEPeRYxRqMD371mv3x9q_U3oeGM-sgBaD8kA9ktM/edit