Hello. Today I'd like to talk with you a little bit about how you can make your
term paper look professional. I'm assuming that you already have the basic
body of your term paper filled in, and you can see an example here. The first
thing you'll notice is that this term paper is lacking a cover page. Now, you
could create a cover page completely from scratch, but there's a much quicker
way of creating a cover page -- and as an added bonus, not only is it faster, but it
will also probably result in a much more professional-looking cover page. You'd go
to the insert tab, go to cover page, and you'll see a number of designs already
set up for you. If you don't like any of them, you can go to office.com to see
some additional ones. I'm going to choose the Facet design. One thing I noticed
right from the beginning is, my name is here already. How did Word know to put my
name there? Well, it knows that that's where the author or the creator of the
document's name should go. and it knows my name because the very first time I went
into Word, it asked me. "What is your name," and I typed it in. So, here it's telling
me I need to have the document's title.
I don't want to have a subtitle for this particular paper so I'm going to right-click
in this control, and I'll choose to remove content control. I'll do the same
thing for the abstract, but that's just actually going to move remove the body
of the abstract, if you will, the main meat of it. It doesn't remove this text
box that contains the word "abstract." To remove that, I'm going to click on the
border and just simply hit the "delete" key. I'll put in my email address as specified
and as quickly and as easily as that, I have a cover page. Now, the next thing I
want to do is add some references to this term paper. Actually, what I should
have done was -- as I was typing out this term paper, as soon as I made use of a
reference in the document, I should have added it to the list of references that
Word knows about -- but I did not do that, so I'm going to rectify the problem
right now. I'm going to go to the references tab in Word. I'm going to go to
"Manage Sources." Now on the left side you'll see my Master Listing. This is my list of all
of the references that I've created before, whether or not they are in this
document. The references that I've told Word I am actually using in this
document are in the current list. So I have one reference that I
already do have in here. I'd like to add some additional ones, so I'm going to click
on the button "New" and I'm going to specify what sort of reference is this:
Is it a book? Is it a journal article? Is it a website? I'm going to leave it at
"website," but you'll notice if I do choose it change it to a journal article or
book, the specific information that Word is requesting will change. So it is
asking me the author. I've looked at the website, but I cannot tell who the author is,
so I'll just put down "unknown." The name of the webpage-- and, since I'm just making
this up on the fly, "web page name" the name of the website "website name," (and
again, in real life you'd be putting in the actual names of the web page and the
website if you can find that information) the year, month and, day are when the site
was created -- and again ,if you can find that information fantastic. If not, it's
ok to leave a blank. If nothing else you will definitely be able to find the URL.
These are the fields that are most likely to be needed; however, there are
additional fields that are possible and, especially if you cannot find when the
site was created, these are the recommended fields.
You can at least indicate when you accessed the file,
and I access this in the year of 2017, March the third, and I'll say, "OK."
This now lets me know that not only has this reference been added to this paper
itself, you can see it's also been added to the master list.
I'll throw in one additional reference that I typed in at some
previous time. I'll select it from the master list, click on Copy," and then
click, "Close." Now suppose this sentence actually were a quote that I had had
verbatim. I want to have a proper citation for this quote, so I'll put
the sentence in quotation marks. I'll hit a space and I'm going to go to
Insert-->Citation, and I see here listed the three references that we told Word
are going to be used in this document. This was a quote from Smith.
Here, I'll have a citation with a quote from Unknown.Now let's go back to Manage Sources.
You'll notice that the "Smith" and "Unknown" references have check marks
beside them; that's letting me know very quickly and easily that I have
actually cited these particular sources somewhere in my document, but I've not
done anything with Joseph Browns' book, so I might decide
at this point that I wish to add a footnote. Footnotes are going to show up
at the bottom of the same page, and endnotes will show up at the end of the
document, but either one can be used. If you use footnotes, generally you use only
footnotes in the paper. or you'll use only endnotes in the paper; you're not
generally going to be mixing and matching them. So I'll throw in a
footnote here. Again on the references tab, I will click on Insert-->Footnote and
you'll see that a little superscript 1 shows up right where it had my insertion
point, and then down at the bottom of the page, I have a corresponding number 1. And
I could say something like, "See" and I'll put in this citation of Joseph Brown "for
more information." So I now have my paper with the proper citations in it. Now I
have to create my bibliography. I'll go to the end of
the paper. Again on the references tab, I'll go into Bibliography, and I can see
there are a few different styles that are available.
I'll choose "Bibliography," and as quickly and as easily as that, the bibliography
gets generated. But now I have a problem. I realize, "Oh no! I've been using APA
format. My teacher told me that I need to use MLA format. Okay this is going to mean a
lot of changes in here." I can see I've got this is in the old APA
format with the author's name and the year of publication. The bibliography is
in APA format. All the work that I'm gonna have to do
to change it to MLA! I come to the Styles drop down list and change this to MLA.
As quickly and as easily as that, everything's changed: the bibliography is
now in MLA format, and you can see that the citations have also been
changed. No longer does it say "Smith 2016"; it just says "Smith." It's as quick and as easy as that.
I'll change it back to APA, and again you can see how quickly the change is made.
So the really nice thing -- there are several nice things about using the
Source Manager in Word (which you get to by clicking on Manage Sources) and
putting in the citations in this way -- first of all, you only have to type in a
reference one time you'll then be able to use it not only in the current
document, but all subsequent documents. If you wind up in the current document
needing MLA format and subsequent documents need APA format, that's not a
problem. You don't have to worry about all the nitty-gritty details of the
style -- Where do I put parentheses, underlines, italicizations, periods
verses commas ... you don't have to deal with all of that --
that's Word's headache. So you can see that if you know how to use Word's
References tab and the Insert-->Cover Page, you can very quickly and easily make a
professional-looking term paper. Thank you.