In this last module, you’ll practice writing one more academic essay.
The documented essay really isn’t anything new.
The other two essays you’ve written in this course were documented essays.
Documented just means that you use sources to support your points.
You will also be challenged to write a longer essay than the ones you’ve already done.
Documented Essay Video Lecture
In this lesson you’re going to learn about documented essays.
A documented essay is just an essay supported by documentation.
Two other types of documented essays that you might write in a college class are the documented critical essay, which is a research paper about literature.
One thing that will be different for the documented essay is that you are going to choose your own topic for this assignment.
That’s the kind of topic you should choose for this essay.
If it’s something that there had been lots of opinions written about, then it’s not going to make a good topic for your documented essay.
Before you start writing, you need to plan your essay.
Try to think of your thesis statement first, this will help guide your essay.
You can write a thesis like in your synthesis essay, where you were showing the reader something important.
Since we are trying to make our essays longer to prepare for that research paper, in this essay you should try to have 5-6 body paragraphs.
With your introduction and conclusion, that means your essay would be seven or eight paragraphs total.
Because it’s a documented essay, you of course, need to use sources.
Each body paragraph should have a couple of sources.
Try to have at least one source in everybody paragraph.
This means your essay would have five or six quotations or paraphrases.
You could have two quotations in your essay from the same source, but you should not have six quotations from one source.
You probably need to find two or three articles that you can use for this essay.
The other new thing for this type of essay is we’re going to use a works cited page.
Any time you write a documented essay, you have to cite your sources.
In MLA format, you write your sources in a works cited page.
The works cited page is the last page of your essay.
If your essay is three pages, then your works cited would be the fourth page, like it is here.
If your essay is nine pages, then your work cited page would be page ten.
Creating a Works Cited Page Video Lecture
In this lecture, I’m going to show you how to create a works cited page.
You can see that the first line of each source is on the left margin, and then each other line in the source is indented.
So how did we get these entries? Each works cited entry has roughly four parts.
Here’s the article for that first entry in the works cited.
In the works cited, we can see that the writer accessed that page on October 1.
So that’s all you need to know for writing a works cited page in this class.
You can you the sample works cited pages, in this course, in as a guide for you.
After the author’s name, there’s a period.
The author’s last name and first name have a comma between them.
Remember in your in text citations, you used the author’s last name.
That last name needs to match one of the names in the works cited page.
You see the author’s name in the sentence here, David Fahrenthold.
Then we know that that’s the first name and last name.
We should be able to find the last name alphabetically in the works cited page.
This was a paraphrase using the article that did not have an author’s name.
They should be the first words of the entry in the work cited page.
You see the title is actually longer, Ova Expels Plagiarizing Ohio University Student from Ship, but in the in text citation, we just need a couple of those words, and they need to have quotation marks, because it’s a title.
