ALEC 240: Effective Oral Communication

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when preparing your verbal citations:

• Be brief.
• Introduce a source before sharing your cited ideas, facts, or quotations.
• Use introductory phrases to make a citation to feel closer to natural speech.
• Verbal citations are meant to give credibility to your work and help you avoid plagiarism.
• Have a written long-form citation available to share with the group if you're asked for more information.

A citation's role is to inform your audience credibility of your sources and to help them find the source later. You want to highlight the most important parts of the source, or the who, what, where, and when:

• Name of author
• Author's credentials
• Affiliated organization or institution
• Title of publication
• Type of source
• Published date or issued date

Start your citation with an introductory phrase and include the source components that will help your audience find the source.

For example:

"According to Amanda Mull, a journalist at The Atlantic magazine, in her December 2020 article..."

"An April 2020 report by Emily Vogels for the Pew Research Center, shows how Americans are using the internet during the Covid-19 pandemic."

Caption are available in the video above. 

Instances requiring appropriate citations include when an author:

• Uses direct quotations
• Summarizes ideas with no modifications from the original source
• Reports statistics
• Communicates others' opinions

However, a presenter does not need to provide citations for facts or statements that are within the limits of common knowledge.

Common knowledge may include:

• Information or knowledge that most people are aware of
• Information widely known by a cultural, social, political, or geopolitical group.
• Information widely known within a specific academic discipline.

However, what is recognized as common knowledge can vary greatly from audience to audience. For example, developments during the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s may be well known to audiences familiar with agriculture and would be considered common knowledge. On the other hand, if this same information was presented to an audience with no prior experience in agriculture, a citation may be needed as these facts would not be considered common knowledge.

A presenter must always be aware of the audience's expertise or limitations when constructing a speech and developing appropriate citations.