Citation Remediation
Purpose of Exercise: How many times have you tried teaching your students MLA guidelines, and in how many ways? Maybe it was a Jeopardy game. Maybe it was a lengthy Powerpoint or a PDF of guidelines. This exercise will allow your students to engage with citations relevant to their own projects by breaking the process down into steps which they are responsible for providing a set of multimodal instructions for completing.
Description: Students will be composing a how-to guide for creating a citation relevant to a project they are currently working on which features what text is being cited, what format to use, where to find the necessary information for creating it, and what the finished product looks like, and why.
Suggested Time: Class period
Procedure: Your students should be participating in this exercise in the context of a project for your course, one which requires secondary sources and/or a primary text of some kind. Have your students consult their McGraw-Hill Handbooks and/or the Purdue Owl in search of how to cite the type of text being cited. From here, students will combine images and text to show how to make an in-text citation and works cited entry for their chosen text, with an explanation of where they got the information (URL on the OWL or pages in the McGraw-Hill Handbook). Prezi and Powerpoint offer good venues for compiling and organizing the steps in citation creation, as they have slides/a path built into them which will help students think about creating citations as a process. The final product should serve as a step-by-step how-to guide for making an in-text citation and a works cited entry for a particular type of text which the rest of the class can use as a model for making their own citations as related to their own projects.
Additional Information: This activity works best in a computer writing classroom, but can be altered to accommodate a lack of computer technology. Depending on the project or range of sources being used, you can break your students into groups responsible for particular texts (web source, movie, song, album, TV show, video game, etc.) which are prevalent for the project at hand, and can present their finished work at the end of class to their peers, depending on time and resources at your disposal.