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Facharbeit: Citing correctly

This page was translated from German with AI. It has not been checked by a native speaker. Original page in German

Every thought that is not your own gets a reference. This is about the rules: two ways of citing, direct and indirect quotation, the bibliography – and what can be cited at all.
📄 Open worksheet (PDF, German)

The video

This video needs no program. How you apply the rules in the word processor is shown in the next video. The worksheet applies to both.

Subtitles are available in ten languages. Choose them at the bottom right of the video.

Contents of the video

  1. 0:00 What it is about
  2. 0:25 Two ways of citing
  3. 0:55 Direct quotation
  4. 1:28 Indirect quotation
  5. 1:58 Bibliography
  6. 2:28 What can be cited?
  7. 2:58 Summary

The most important points

Author-year style and footnote style compared.
Author-year style and footnote style compared.

Consistent

Which way of citing you choose matters less than that you keep to it throughout the paper. Often the school prescribes one.

Direct quotation: word for word, in “…”, with the page number; long quotations as a block quotation.
Direct quotation: word for word, in “…”, with the page number; long quotations as a block quotation.
Basic forms for a book, an article and an internet source.
Basic forms for a book, an article and an internet source.

An AI chatbot is not a source – it can invent references. If you use AI tools, you state it the way your school requires.

The worksheet

Here you can see the worksheet for the video (in German). If there is a practice file, you download it above and work in your own word processor. The hints are printed upside down – turn the sheet only when you cannot get on by yourself. You can also open it as a PDF.

📄 Open worksheet (PDF, German)

The worksheet – Page 1
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The worksheet – Page 2
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The worksheet – Page 3
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Show the worksheet solutions
The worksheet – Page 4
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Try it yourself

Task

Is this plagiarism? A paragraph from a website in which some words are replaced by synonyms, without a reference.

Show solution

Yes. The thought and the structure come from another source; a reference is needed even for reworded text.

Keep learning with a language model

You are my teacher. Give me three short passages from an invented source with author, year and page. For each I write a direct and an indirect quotation with a reference. Check my quotations and explain mistakes briefly. Do not invent real books.

How this was made: The idea and the choice of topics are mine. A language model (LLM) drafted the script, the sample paper, the tasks and this page following my instructions. The screen recordings were made automatically by a script in LibreOffice (in the browser, with Collabora Online), which checked after every step that the setting was really saved. The voice was generated with Qwen3-TTS, modelled on my own voice.

The sample paper about the thread pendulum is invented, and so are the person “Alex Beispiel” and the two sources in the bibliography.

The videos, worksheets, practice files, texts and prompts in this series are licensed under CC BY 4.0: you may use, change and share them if you name the source.