DRP Activity Part 4: Sources
- Open all of the sources you use in these paragraphs in your browser.
- Convert your in-text citations to hyperlinks
For popular sources: copy the URL, go back to your paragraphs, and hyperlink part of the “rhetorical context phrase” that introduces the source. Remove the in-text citation.
- Ex. In his blog post, Bob Breadwinner, a farmer in Podunk, Kansas, explains how his crop yield increased by X% once he started using GM seeds: “Blah blah pathos quote blah.”
- Note: the decision of what to hyperlink is a tricky one; it depends on what you think will make the most sense to your audience. In this example, “blog post,” “Bob Breadwinner,” and “how his crop yield increased by X%” are all viable options. “Blog post” would make sense if you had more than one Bob Breadwinner article, or if Bob Breadwinner were a professor, yet you were citing his blog, not a scholarly article. “Bob Breadwinner” would make sense if he were a major stakeholder in this conversation--if you could Google Bob Breadwinner and find that he’s a big name, someone your audience would benefit from knowing more about. I chose “his crop yield increased by X%” because that’s the most salient bit of information for this hypothetical example. For my purposes, Bob Breadwinner the individual person is less important than his crop yield.
- You can also hyperlink more than one thing, which I recommend in SOME cases. If Bob Breadwinner is a wicked big deal, you might keep the "his crop yield increased by X%" link to the source, but then find another page that gives a great bio of Bob Breadwinner, and hyperlink his name to that. (The page needs to be legit. If all you can find is a Wikipedia entry, don’t do this). Or, if this sentence included something obscure, like Scary Chemical Name or Weird Scientific Term, it would be good to provide a link to a definition of that thing.
- You should DEFINITELY do this “multi-hyperlink” thing when your source is citing something else, like a report, a chart, another source, etc.
- Ex. In her New York Times op/ ed, Sally Smith, a rock star biologist, uses the 2015 UN report on climate change to argue that GM crops are vital to feed the world’s increasing population, especially in light of climate change’s impact on agriculture in low-lying developing countries.
- If the above links were real, they'd go to places like this:
- Sally Smith: link to impressive bio
- The 2015 UN report on climate change link to the 2015 UN report on climate change
- climate change’s impact on agriculture in low-lying developing countries: link to Smith’s NYT op/ed
- If the above links were real, they'd go to places like this:
- Ex. In her New York Times op/ ed, Sally Smith, a rock star biologist, uses the 2015 UN report on climate change to argue that GM crops are vital to feed the world’s increasing population, especially in light of climate change’s impact on agriculture in low-lying developing countries.
For scholarly sources: Okay, now things get interesting. Most scholarly sources are locked behind paywalls, so copying the URL to your scholarly sources is NOT what you want to do. Your off-campus readers won’t have access to direct links to your scholarly sources. You need to link to something else.
- Options that actual scholars and professional writers do:
- Link to the source in the journal, not the database. Just Google it in Google Scholar to find it. You’re only going to get your readers to the abstract, but at least you’re linking them to the real location as opposed to the one in the database.
- Link to your own References page so that your readers can look it up themselves, if they want to.
- The above two choices are “industry-standards,” though they’re admittedly still annoying to casual readers. What else could you do?
- You could download the pdf and upload it to your website. This is technically illegal, of course, but people do it all the time. Proceed with extreme caution, and note that I am not officially endorsing this.