Hello. Today I'd like to talk with you a
little bit about how you can make your
term paper look professional. I'm
assuming that you already have the basic
body of your term paper filled in, and
you can see an example here. The first
thing you'll notice is that this term
paper is lacking a cover page. Now, you
could create a cover page completely
from scratch, but there's a much quicker
way of creating a cover page -- and as an
added bonus, not only is it faster, but it
will also probably result in a much more
professional-looking cover page. You'd go
to the insert tab, go to cover page, and
you'll see a number of designs already
set up for you. If you don't like any of
them, you can go to office.com to see
some additional ones. I'm going to choose the Facet design. One thing I noticed
right from the beginning is, my name is
here already. How did Word know to put my
name there? Well, it knows that that's
where the author or the creator of the
document's name should go. and it knows my name because the very first time I went
into Word, it asked me. "What is your name," and I typed it in. So, here it's telling
me I need to have the document's title.
I don't want to have a subtitle for this
particular paper so I'm going to right-click
in this control, and I'll choose to
remove content control. I'll do the same
thing for the abstract, but that's just
actually going to move remove the body
of the abstract, if you will, the main
meat of it. It doesn't remove this text
box that contains the word "abstract." To
remove that, I'm going to click on the
border and just simply hit the "delete"
key. I'll put in my email address as specified
and as quickly and as easily as that, I
have a cover page. Now, the next thing I
want to do is add some references to
this term paper. Actually, what I should
have done was -- as I was typing out this
term paper, as soon as I made use of a
reference in the document, I should have
added it to the list of references that
Word knows about -- but I did not do that,
so I'm going to rectify the problem
right now. I'm going to go to the references tab in Word. I'm going to go to
"Manage Sources." Now on the left side you'll see my Master Listing. This is my list of all
of the references that I've created before,
whether or not they are in this
document. The references that I've told
Word I am actually using in this
document are in the current list. So I
have one reference that I
already do have in here. I'd like to add
some additional ones, so I'm going to click
on the button "New" and I'm going to
specify what sort of reference is this:
Is it a book? Is it a journal article? Is
it a website? I'm going to leave it at
"website," but you'll notice if I do choose
it change it to a journal article or
book, the specific information that Word
is requesting will change. So it is
asking me the author. I've looked at the
website, but I cannot tell who the author is,
so I'll just put down "unknown." The name
of the webpage-- and, since I'm just making
this up on the fly, "web page name" the
name of the website "website name," (and
again, in real life you'd be putting in
the actual names of the web page and the
website if you can find that information)
the year, month and, day are when the site
was created -- and again ,if you can find
that information fantastic. If not, it's
ok to leave a blank. If nothing else you
will definitely be able to find the URL.
These are the fields that are most
likely to be needed; however, there are
additional fields that are possible and,
especially if you cannot find when the
site was created, these are the
recommended fields.
You can at least indicate when you accessed the file,
and I access this in the year of
2017, March the third, and I'll say, "OK."
This now lets me know that not only has
this reference been added to this paper
itself, you can see it's also been added
to the master list.
I'll throw in one additional reference
that I typed in at some
previous time. I'll select it from
the master list, click on Copy," and then
click, "Close." Now suppose this sentence
actually were a quote that I had had
verbatim. I want to have a proper
citation for this quote, so I'll put
the sentence in quotation marks.
I'll hit a space and I'm going to go to
Insert-->Citation, and I see here listed
the three references that we told Word
are going to be used in this document.
This was a quote from Smith.
Here, I'll have a citation with a quote
from Unknown.Now let's go back to Manage Sources.
You'll notice that the "Smith" and
"Unknown" references have check marks
beside them; that's letting me know
very quickly and easily that I have
actually cited these particular sources
somewhere in my document, but I've not
done anything with Joseph Browns' book, so I might decide
at this point that I wish to add a
footnote. Footnotes are going to show up
at the bottom of the same page, and
endnotes will show up at the end of the
document, but either one can be used. If
you use footnotes, generally you use only
footnotes in the paper. or you'll use
only endnotes in the paper; you're not
generally going to be mixing and
matching them. So I'll throw in a
footnote here. Again on the references
tab, I will click on Insert-->Footnote and
you'll see that a little superscript 1
shows up right where it had my insertion
point, and then down at the bottom of the
page, I have a corresponding number 1. And
I could say something like, "See" and I'll
put in this citation of Joseph Brown "for
more information." So I now have my paper with the proper citations in it. Now I
have to create my bibliography. I'll go to the end of
the paper. Again on the references tab, I'll go into Bibliography, and I can see
there are a few different styles that
are available.
I'll choose "Bibliography," and as quickly
and as easily as that, the bibliography
gets generated. But now I have a problem.
I realize, "Oh no! I've been using APA
format. My teacher told me that I need to
use MLA format. Okay this is going to mean a
lot of changes in here." I can see
I've got this is in the old APA
format with the author's name and the
year of publication. The bibliography is
in APA format.
All the work that I'm gonna have to do
to change it to MLA! I come to the Styles
drop down list and change this to MLA.
As quickly and as easily as that,
everything's changed: the bibliography is
now in MLA format, and you can
see that the citations have also been
changed. No longer does it say "Smith 2016"; it just says "Smith." It's as quick and as easy as that.
I'll change it back to APA, and again you
can see how quickly the change is made.
So the really nice thing -- there are
several nice things about using the
Source Manager in Word (which you get to by clicking on Manage Sources) and
putting in the citations in this way --
first of all, you only have to type in a
reference one time you'll then be able
to use it not only in the current
document, but all subsequent documents. If you wind up in the current document
needing MLA format and subsequent
documents need APA format, that's not a
problem. You don't have to worry about
all the nitty-gritty details of the
style -- Where do I put parentheses,
underlines, italicizations, periods
verses commas ... you don't have to deal
with all of that --
that's Word's headache. So you can see
that if you know how to use Word's
References tab and the Insert-->Cover Page, you can very quickly and easily make a
professional-looking term paper. Thank
you.