Writing: Cite Sources for a Discussion Board Post

You've been asked to prepare a response to a discussion board prompt, and the directions tell you to " refer directly to the articles you have read, with APA-style in-text citations as needed and references at the end."

Sure.  Okay.  Except the rich content editor (that's the WYSIWYG text box) that pops up when you write a discussion board post in Canvas doesn't provide you with an easy way to create that formatting.

• There's no built-in double-spacing ability.
• There's no way to easily create a hanging indent (what it's called when you indent the second line of a reference.)
• There's no way to create a separate "References" page.

What do you do?

The answer is to use in-text citations in the body of your discussion board post and create a section at the end of the post to act as the References page.

[1]  The first type of citation is called a parenthetical citation.  In parenthetical citations, the author name(s) and publication date appear in parentheses at the end of paraphrased information.

[2]  The second citation is called a narrative citation, where the author name(s) is incorporated into the text as part of the sentence and the year follows in parentheses.

[3] At the end of your post, use the heading References and put your complete citations below in alphabetical order with a blank line between each citation.  Do not number them.  Don't worry about double-spacing or hanging indents -- the discussion board simply isn't built for that.