Sometimes in college-level writing you will come across something you don’t know how to format correctly. When you turn to your style guides for help, you may find that they don’t always speak to the particular problems or situations you are facing. The style guides we use are just that—they are guides—and they simply can’t address everything we use in our observations and research.
There are a few things you can do if you come across this problem. First of all, let’s be clear about what you must not do: don’t take give up too easily and decide too early that style guides are not worth consulting. The first thing you should do is exhaust every single guide book you have at your disposal to find your answer.
Style Guide Tips
If that doesn’t work it may be time to try a few tricks:
1. Do an advanced Internet search for your specific item. If you type the name of your item into a search engine and put quotation marks around it, you just might find it popping up in the bibliography of a published paper.
2. Go to the web site of a respected university and so a site search for the university style guide. Most colleges have a public relations office that provides such a guide for their faculty and staff.
3. Call a reference librarian and ask for advice in a nice and respectful way. They are a wonderful resource! You may need to call a few libraries before you find your answer, but if you are persistent you will find a bored librarian who is intrigued by your question and who wants to get to the bottom of it. Sometimes you can get lucky and find one that loves a good challenge.
4. Find an item in your style guide that closely resembles your source and fashion your own citation based on the rules you already know. For instance, if you are using a hand-written grocery list as a source and you can’t find a model for citing it, use the model of a similar item, like a recipe.
And the trickiest trick of all:
5. Find a list of your professor’s publications. You will find one on your school’s web site or by using a simple search engine. Go to the bibliography of the teacher/professor’s work and look for items similar to the one you’re dealing with. If it’s good enough for your professor, it’s good enough for you!
