Sources + Reference Test

In English class today, we learned about sources in an academic essay, and spent the rest of the time working on the reference test via google documents. First, Mr.Paterson taught us that one of the major differences between an essay and an academic essay is that they are backed up by data and information. Within them, there are two kinds called primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are pieces of data collected by ourselves, while the latter is information gathered by another. For example, a survey by a researcher you found online, is considered a secondary source. The teacher taught us that those are more found more frequently in academic essays because they’re more  trustworthy. You might be asking yourself, how so? Well, when we try to gather information ourselves, it often times turns out inaccurate or unbalanced. Mr.Paterson used the height of people as an example. If you only ask a few people, it cannot represent the entire race. In addition, if you only ask people in a poor country with undernourished people, it can be considered unreliable data. For this reason, we use secondary sources which is information that has been gathered properly. Then, Mr. Paterson taught us about the three big styles of referencing those. MLA, APA, and Chicago Manual are the main styles, and they’re are about 9000 styles in the world including the minor ones. While some say that you can use whichever style you’d like, we were taught that these must be used accordingly. Depending on our topic / genre, for example, history, you must use the style that suits it the most, which would be Chicago manual. With the rest of the class time, having learnt this, we took the reference test through google documents. The purpose was to show Mr.Paterson how much or how little we know about reference formats.