As Gerald Graff and Cathy Writing Berkenstein point out in They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing,  writing an academic context often entails writing about or responding to the words and ideas of other authors. Academic writing is often a “dialogue” or conversation between scholars, where you begin by describing what other scholars have said in order to set up what you want to say. Scholarly research generally builds on or reacts to the work of previous scholars. As student writers, you often use the works of published scholars to support your arguments or provide a framework for your analysis. When you do this, you must cite and document your source; you may also need to specifically identify the author and title that you are referring to within the body text of your work. There are some basic conventions to adhere to when you do this.

Referring to Authors

The first time that you mention the author, use the full name (but no titles, such as Mr. Ms, or Dr.). If there are more than three authors, use the Latin abbreviated term et al. to refer to additional authors:

Steve Rathje wrote “The power of framing” in 2017^[1], but his political examples are still relevant today.

Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky use similar examples in “Metaphors we think with” ^[2], but they take a more academic approach.

“Your brain on ChatGPT,” a scientific study by Natalia Kosmyna et al.^[3], has not yet been peer-reviewed, but because its findings are so startling, a preprint is available online.

Every time you refer to the author after the first time, use the last name only. Never refer to the author by the first name (“Steve”) only. Always use the last name:

• Rathje uses an accessible tone in his online piece for The Guardian.
• Thibodeau and Boroditsky write for a more scholarly audience.
• Kosmyna et al. found that that group using AI performed worse than the groups who did not use AI at all measured parameters (neural, linguistic, and scoring).

NOTE: when using IEEE style, you can simply use the authors last names only (you don’t need to include the first name unless you have authors with the same last name).

Referring to Titles

When referring to titles, we use two distinct typographical methods to indicate two kinds of works:

The titles of shorter works that are published within a larger work (an article in a newspaper, an academic article in a journal, a poem in an anthology, a chapter in a book) are enclosed in quotation marks; only capitalize the first word, proper nouns, and first word of a sub-title (after the colon):

“The power of framing: It’s not what you say but how you say it” provides several examples of how political rhetoric frames ideas to appeal to certain people.

When referring to titles of larger works, or works that have smaller articles or chapters within them (books, newspapers, magazines, periodicals, movies, novels, etc.), use italics*:

Rathje’s article is published in The Guardian, a respected British newspaper.

* Note: before computers, people underlined these kinds of titles, as this was the only option available on a typewriter; however, underlining is “so 20th century” and is no longer done unless you are writing by hand.

Using these conventions help the reader to know what kind of text you are writing about without you having to specify it. Like most specialized terminology or conventions, it offers a kind of short hand to avoid wordiness. If you do this incorrectly, you mislead and confuse the reader.

For example, if you are writing about William Blake’s poem, “The Lamb,” you must use quotation marks around the title.  If you don’t use them, and simply write — the lamb — then you are referring to the animal, not the poem. If you italicize The Lamb, you are telling the reader that this is the title of a book (which is incorrect and misleads the reader).