ASU Sociology Department

Section One: Preparing Your Text

Papers you write for your sociology classes, for presentation to scholarly conferences, or for publication in professional journals should all follow a similar form. All text should be printed double-spaced on 81/2-by-11-inch white bond. Do not use colored paper unless asked by your instructor. Margins should be about 1.25 inches.

Your title page should include a title for the paper (center this, about 1/3 of the way down the page), your name, the name of the course you are submitting the paper for, your instructor's name, and the date. The latter information can either be centered, about 2/3 of the way down the page, or located in the bottom right quadrant of the paper.

Not every instructor requires an abstract. Check to see if your instructor wants an abstract. If you include an abstract, it should be on a separate page following the title page. Include the paper title above the abstract, but do not include your name or other information. The abstract must be one brief paragraph (no more than 150 words) and should describe the major points and contributions of your paper.

Start the text of your paper on a separate page, headed by the title of the paper. This page counts as page one of your paper. Number the next page and all following pages. You may place page numbers in the upper right corner or in the bottom center of your pages.

Your reference list follows the text of your paper (but is numbered along with the text). This page should be titled, "References." All references cited in your paper should be in the reference list. Do not include references you may have looked at but did not find useful enough to cite or quote. Do not pad your reference page. Refer to Section Two (below) for information on constructing the reference page.

We prefer that you use "in text citations" rather than footnotes. Be sure to cite in your paper any source (1) which you quote, (2) to which you refer specifically, or (3) from which you derived specific information. Your citations allow the reader to gauge the quality of the information you use in your paper, to read the sources you used to gather further information, and to check the accuracy of your statements.

Your citations should include the last names of the author you are citing and the year of publication of the source you are citing. If you are quoting a passage or referring to a specific idea or fact, the citation should also include the page number. Most writers now prefer to include information on the author and the author's name in the text; this is often a cleaner style. You will find it useful to put as much information in the text itself as possible.

Following are several examples of citations. Use these models in your own writing.

If the author's name is included in your sentence, cite only the year of publication:

...where Reese argues against faulty reasoning in popularized social sciences (1996).

If the author's name is NOT included in your sentence, cite author and year of publication:

...offers a powerful argument against faulty reasoning in popularized social sciences (Reese 1996).

When you cite information from a specific page, and name the authors in the sentence, then cite the year of publication and include the page number after a colon:

...Scarboro and Luck argue that Wicca challenges sociologists' understanding of contemporary religion in America (1997: 70).

If you do not include the authors in your sentence, cite them in the parenthesis:

...the argument is made in a different form in an earlier work (Scarboro, Campbell, and Stave 1994: 265).

Quotations often give writers problems, although the stylistic concerns should not be a big deal. Short quotations are included in your paragraph and are identified by quotation marks. The source of the quotation is cited at the end of the quotation--after the ending quotation marks. Note that the sentence's punctuation follows the citation--outside the parenthesis.

In her incisive article on men's voluntary exposure to pornography, Davies concludes that "greater exposure to pornography did not result in more negative opinions towards feminism" (1997:136).

Or...

Alienation was found to be "a processionally enacted quality of an activity, an interaction, or a relationship"(Reese 1997:73).

Longer quotations seem to give more trouble, but the correct style here is also fairly simple: for quotations longer than three lines of text, set the quotation off in a block. The block should be indented and set in smaller font. Do NOT use quotation marks with blocked quotations. Do cite the source at the end of the quotation:

Reese (1997) argues the centrality of the concept of alienation to the practice of sociology: At the heart of sociological practice is the dialectical foundation of the discipline given by first Marx and then Durkheim. It is hardly surprising then that the core concepts of the discipline--Marx's concept of alienation and Durkheim's concept of anomie--have generated a surfeit of attention (P. 72).

He continues by arguing that, despite the centrality of these concepts, they continue to be muddied in sociological writing and thinking.

Note: since the author and year of publication were named in the sentence, in this example, the page quoted is indicated by the capital "P" in parenthesis at the end of the blocked quotation.

Here are some more examples of using a blocked quote:

Debates on the relationships among viewing pornography and a wide variety of anti-social attitudes andbehaviors have been sharp, divisive, and passionate; however, these debates have seldom been fueled by appropriate studies. For example,My research suggests that pornographic videos may not have the effects on men that anti-pornography feminists have previously argued....the results of this research indicate that experimental studies may not, as has been suggested, be a valid representation of what occurs outside an experimental laboratory...(Davies 1997:136).

Or...

New studies have begun to re-think the old idea of colleges as collegium; that is, as educational communities.One model research report tackles this idea head-on: This new quest for community seeks to forge the fragmented experiences of diverse people into a new form of solidarity, a new type of community, consistent with the trends of modern society...[seeking] tomaintain the values of individualism while simultaneously providing a sense of identity and belonging to a community that dispenses with antiurban and antimodern biases as well as the popular nostalgic views of pre- industrial communists (Thompson and Johnston 1977:1-2).

This model recognizes the roots of modern colleges in the Arcadian retreats of nineteenth-century educational enterprises while pleading for a more democratic, this-worldly group engaged in a mutually-supportive but not necessarily identical set of goals.

For other examples, refer to any of the style guides listed at the beginning of these comments on style.

Section Two: Citing Your References

The "References" section of your paper lists all the works you actually cite or refer to in your paper. Usually, you will not include works that you looked at but did not find useful; cite only those you quote from or refer to directly. Citations from different kinds of sources follow somewhat different rules; the following list gives examples from most of these kinds of sources. Also be sure to alphabatize your list.

Books

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1996. A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial. New York: Doubleday.

Weber, Max. 1996. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Introduction by Randall Collins. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

Agee, James and Walker Evans. 1960. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three
Tenant Families. New York: Ballantine Books.

Scarboro, Allen, Nancy Campbell, and Shirley Stave. 1994. Living Witchcraft: A
Contemporary American Coven.Westport, CT: Praeger.

Henslin, James M. 1997. Down to Earth Sociology: Introductory Readings. 9th ed.
New York: Free Press.

Articles From Collected Works

Case, Charles E. 1997. "Racist and Egalitarian Ideologies in Modern American
Culture." Pp. 99-105 in Analyzing Social Problems, edited by Dana Dunn and David Waller. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Reese, William A. II. 1997. "Alienation: Extending an Interactionist Conceptualization." Pp. 59-84 in Constructing Complexity: Symbolic Interaction and Social Forms, edited by Dan E. Miller, Michael A. Katovich, and Stanley L. Saxton. (Supplement 3 to Studies in Symbolic Interaction, edited by Norman K. Denzin). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

From Journals

Davies, Kimberly. 1997. "Voluntary Exposure to Pornography and Men's Attitudes
Toward Feminism and Rape."Journal of Sex Research, 34, 2: 131-137.

Case, Charles and John Arthur. 1994. "Race, Class, and Support for Police Use of
Force." Crime Law and SocialChange, 21:167-182.

Reese, William A., II. 1996. "The Shaped Bell Curve and the Social
Sciences." Social Science Journal 33:113-119.

Wardell, Mark L. and Robert L. Johnston. 1987. "Class Struggle and Industrial
Transformation: The U.S. Anthracite Industry, 1820-1902." Theory and Society
16:781-808.

Scarboro, Allen and Philip Andrew Luck. 1997. "The Goddess and Power: Witchcraft and Religion in America." Journal of Contemporary Religion 12(1):69-79.

From Newspapers

Reese, William A., II. 1995. "Community Should Unite, Seek Solutions to Underlying Causes of Crime." Augusta Chronicle, September 21, p. 5A.

Dissertations and Theses

Watkins, Ralph C. 1997. The Institutionalization of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of
Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

Technical Reports

Thompson, Ernestine and Robert L. Johnston. 1997. "And the Greatest of These Is Respect: A Report on Focus Groups with Members of the ASU Community." Department of Sociology, Augusta State University, Augusta, Georgia.

Johnston, Robert L., Tanya D. Davis, and Sheryl T. Redmon. 1995. "The 1995 Augusta College Student Profile." Sociology Research Methods Students. Department of Sociology, Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia.

Papers Presented at Professional Meetings

Thompson, Ernestine. 1994. "Evaluating Teaching: Redefining Scholarly Work in
Sociology." Presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association, August 20, Los Angeles.

Davies, Kimberly. 1997. "Economic Inequality Among Women and Female Perpetrated Homicide in 1990." Presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, March 13, Louisville, Kentucky.

Nall, Lorraine E. and Kimberly Davies. 1998. "Cultural Representations of Women and Girls in Elementary School Textbooks." Presented at the annual meeting of the MidSouth Sociological Association, October 15, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Luck, Philip Andrew, Johanna Moronta, and Johnny Smith. 1996. "Graduate Students Mentoring Undergraduates." Presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, April 4, Richmond, Virginia.

Electronic Sources: An on-line journal article

Reese, William A., II, Russell L. Curtis, and James R. Whitworth. 1988. "Dispositional Discretion or Disparity: The Juvenile Probation Officer's Role in Delinquency Processing." Journal of Applied Behavioral Sciences 21:81-101. Retrieved 12 March 1998 (http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQ8).

: An abstract

Howell, Frank M. and William A. Reese. 1986. "Sex and Mobility in the Dual Economy: From Entry to Midcareer" (Abstract). Work and Occupations 13:77- 97. Retrieved 12 March 1998 (http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?R8).

Interviews

Scarboro, Allen. 1996. Interview of Lady Sintana [Candace Hunstman] by author.
Atlanta, Georgia, April 22.