This is a great site
provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison on writing.
It has a lot of helpful advice on how to write clearly.
Also, I would strongly suggest that you read this
essay by George Orwell. It's one of his most famous, called
"Politics and the English Language." If you want to skip to the
good stuff, scroll to the bottom of the essay and read his rules for
writing.
Citations:
Here are a couple of examples of
sentences
from one of the readings and how they are cited within the text.
This is the standard for most political science writing today.
First, the sentences:
This generic predispositional model has guided research on voting
behavior (Campbell, et al. 1960), political socialization (Hyman 1959;
D. Sears 1975) . . .
Rather, predispositions may crystallize in stepwise fashion, with
periodic leaps forward triggered by information-rich political events
(Sears and Valentino 1997).
So say you wrote something like one of the above sentenes and included
a citation. On the last page of your paper, which you could call
"Citations" if you wish, but is more commonly called "References", you
would put the following
information in these formats:
References
Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E.
Stokes. 1960. The American Voter.
New York: Wiley.
Hyman, Herbert H. 1959. Political Socialization. Glencoe, IL: Free
Press.
Sears, David O. 1975. "Political Socialization." In Handbook of
Political Science, ed. F.I. Greenstein, and N.W. Polsby, vol. 2,
93-153. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Sears, David O., and Nicholas A. Valentino. 1997. "Politics Matters:
Political Events as a Catalyst for Preadult Situation." American
Political Science Review 91:45-65.
The first and second examples are for a book. The third is a
chapter in a book where the author of the piece and the editor of the
book are different people, and the last example is how you would format
a reference to an article in a journal.
Basically, the references follow this format, with some variation:
[Last name (of author)], [first name]: [date]. [Name of piece]. [book or journal title].
[place of publication]: [name of publishing company].
For a journal, you put the volume and page numbers in which the
piece appears in place of the information about the
publisher. Think of a journal as a book; just as a book's title
is either italicized or underlined (your
choice; do either one or the other, but not both like I am doing right here
- this is wrong. Don't do it!!), so is the title of
a journal or edited volume, which you can either think of as a book
with different authors writing the chapters or as a one-time
journal.
If you are doing something that isn't covered here, try
this: Go to an article from the syllabus page and look at the
references section of that article. Then just copy what is done
in that article. Even if you don't have it exactly like I
have here, you'll be pretty close, and at least you'll be
consistent.
Finally, and this might be the easiest thing to do, go to this
web site, which is the same Univeristy of Wisonsin-Madison
Writing Center that I link above, it's just that this link takes you
directly to the section on citations.