A Quarter in College

On March 30, 2011, I, began my introduction into English 102. I remember telling myself that English 102 was only three credits and at the same time thinking this should be a breeze. I can only say after an extremely intense two and a half months I was absolutely wrong. I have been attending Columbus State Community College for a year now and I've never had a class with such an agenda that you're just "gasping for air". Through the quarter we were doing so many different styles, formats, stories, essay's, and articles that it was hard to focus on one particular aspect that I may have been struggling with. Before I turned in my first two essays, I had trouble figuring out my MLA format for my in-text citations and works cited pages; I thought to myself, "This can't be correct". I believe this to be true now as I will point out in this essay with examples from essay one, two, and from my own insight.

First, essay one was on "My Place within the Community" and I entitled my paper "Would You Raise Your Children in Columbus, Ohio?" Our English 102 class had to do in-text citations and a works cited page or reference page in either MLA or APA format for all the quotes and research we incorporated in this essay. For example, in essay one I wrote an in-text citation that stated "Furthermore, on the webpage, Neighborhood Scout, it is stated, '"With a crime rate of ninety-one per one thousand residents, Columbus has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities" (Neighborhood Scout)" (Page 2). This in-text citation was not cited the right way. When I wrote this essay I was really struggling on learning my MLA format. On that note, now I have realized that you need to have the author's full name at the beginning of your sentence and title of article or website in quotation marks following. In addition to that, the quote needs to be written in exact words and at the end it needs the web name in italics, and should also be in quotations. Along the same lines, in essay one on my MLA works cited page, I introduced "Location inc. Neighborhood Scout. 2001-2009. 20 April 2011 <http://www.neighborhoodscout.com/oh/columbus/crime/>(Page 6). When I cited this website in my works cited for essay one, I wasn't sure if the citation was correct. When I got my essay back, I found the works cited citation to be wrong. Finally, I came to the conclusion that you need the author of the article, then the article title in parenthesis. The next part is the title of the source, the copyright, online publisher, date accessed, and end it with the URL, which should be in "tags".

Next, essay two was a topic analysis and annotated bibliography paper that was entitled "Controversy of Abortion". In relation with essay one, the same in-text citation problem