March 25-29

        Activity is starting to speed up in the writing center, if the last two weeks are anything to go on. Just last week, I must have had 4-5 sessions, making about half a week's worth of sessions for me, good for this semester, while this week I got a very similar number, close as I can recall. Friday felt like the busiest time, however, as my short hour and a half slot had both appointments booked, and I filled in for Kensie's last 45 minutes. The sessions I had on Friday were both relatively simple (I even had a return visitor from one of my past sessions, which is always nice), but both sessions revolved around one thing in particular. Works cited pages and in-text citations. In the first case, it was a matter of being unfamiliar with APA format, while the second was having trouble citing non-scholarly sources, such as the page on a gaming website.
         The first student brought in a leadership paper, standard fair for Freshman, and said they needed help with their works cited page. I immediately pulled up Purdue while asking them what citation style their professor preferred, and wasn't surprised when they said APA. Something I realized as I was helping them navigate Purdue and its citation information on APA format is that, while I may be quite knowledgeable at this point about MLA format, my knowledge on APA may be even worse than my knowledge on Chicago - which isn't great. I certainly noticed that, while advising, I was struggling in some areas and using phrases like "probably" and "I think" while going over their paper. This is by no means optimal for me, and I'll be taking time later to study Purdue's formatting guide on APA, if only so I can offer more concrete assistance in the future.
           The second session, as I've said, was a familiar face, so the beginning of the session went wonderfully. They had brought in a comparative style paper based on a recent game release. This ordinarily, as I see it, wouldn't be a problem, save for the fact that one of their sources was for a summary of the game - and little else. Now still, I wouldn't have too much issue with this, but when checking Purdue for how to site a web page, it became rapidly apparent that necessary information was missing from the page. Things like: a title for the page, a journal, author, etc. What I recommended in the end was to use the game as the title for the citation while citing the game's publisher, however I still feel in my gut that I should have recommended dropping the source and finding some other means of summarizing the game - even to the point of using personal experiences, cutting out the need for citations altogether. The session took a good deal of time as we sorted through the confusion and their laptop (which was not being friendly), so I ended up staying an extra 15 minutes to make sure that they got the whole of their paper examined. Despite the difficulties, both this and the prior session felt like they made me aware of a personal weakness in my citation knowledge - one that I will be rectifying as soon as possible.

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