Referencing
A realistic Guide to life at UCLan - written by students!
Comments from students...
Writing critical essays and referencing is a new skill for most new students and advice on referencing varies. But you can get a handy guide to referencing, for about a pound from Blackwell’s bookshop in the student union.
“I don’t know about other people, but our lecturers gave us ‘PowerPoint’ slide shows about how to do it and how to reference, with examples and things. But I suppose that depends on the course.”
“When we started ours, they did a whole days lecturing on the different styles of referencing and stuff and how your lectures would be different to seminars.”
“I think, at the beginning of the year, my lecturer kind of went ‘how many people have done this referencing at school’. Not many people put their hands up and then they said ‘well, everyone already knows it’. Then they obviously realised that some people didn’t know it because the personal tutors have been doing stuff on it since then. I’d never done it before.”
Most experienced students would advise you to find out about referencing and structuring essays before you come to university so you can hit the ground running. WISER helps students brush up their study skills and it seems the brighter students tend to take advantage of it:
“When I was a student at Bristol they held a number of courses which were kind of like ‘WISER’. They had one for international students who weren’t used to writing in a British style. I know that a lot of the foreign students had totally different ideas about how you structure an essay. It wasn’t that different for me but it helps to go over it.”
“I was the student who didn’t use ‘WISER’ and I’m still not sure I did my referencing right. I don’t know if that’s somewhere I may have lost marks, so I think I should have gone to that.”
Note from the TAG Team: Referencing is something you need to get right and if you are sensible you will start looking at referencing before you arrive. You have to reference to avoid being accused of plagiarism which can lead to disciplinary procedures and failing assignments. You can also lose marks for not referencing correctly, so make sure you look in the course or module hand book to make sure know how you are expected to reference on your course – remember different tutors may ask you to reference in different ways! Use WISER if you are struggling with referencing.