I liked the Lafayette College Libraries’ web site for two main reasons. The first is the nature of the students. The web site and information must be visually accessible to them. If there is too much text on a page, or if the text LOOKS hard, they will not interact with it and I will be barraged with a thousand, “Mr. Godfroy, How do I do this?” questions. Because of that I ruled out all the APA web pages. I just know that my students will have trouble with them. (Unfortunately, I like APA. But, being an English teacher, I have a hard time justifying using it.) There is also a big push at my school to make the kids MLA literate. Our media specialist has been working closely with the English department to help teach all the kids to cite using MLA. So, I felt that I needed to look very closely at those sites.

I liked the writesource site. We have class sets of that book at our school and I often refer to it. I really liked the layout of that web page. In fact, I liked it better than the Lafayette page. But, I liked the way the Lafayette page presented the information. It showed the components of a source. It clearly illustrated the different ways and places to find the author of a web page. It did the same for the title of the page. I really liked how straight forward it was. Then at the bottom, it showed examples of properly cited web pages. (The only drawback here was that it showed examples for all three major citations, MLA, APA, and Chicago. That, I’m sure, will need to be clearly explained to my students.)

Examples of sources cited using MLA

Salwen, Peter. The Quotable Mark Twain. n.d. 22 May 2005 http://salwen.com/mtquotes.html

Central Intelligence Agency. CIA-The World Fact Book—Afghanistan. 17 May, 2005. 22 May, 2005 http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html

I would like to point out two things with this next citation. First of all, as a NASCAR fan, I am crushed that you didn’t choose Ryan Newman!! Second, the link didn’t work. I am guessing that you wanted us to go to the Kevin Harvick page, but the link sent us to the generic driver page. I went to the Harvick page.

NASCAR.com: drivers & teams: drivers. n.d. 22 May 2005 http://www.nascar.com/drivers/dps/kharvick00/cup/index.html

McKenzie, Jamie. Building Good New Ideas. 2001. 22 May 2005 http://fno.org/jun01/building.html