My teacher told me to alphabetize my sources for ones such as the one below. What does he mean?
"MLA Works Cited: Electronic Sources (Web Publications)." owl. english. purdue. edu. Purdue University. Web. 18 May 2014. owl. english. purdue. edu/owl/resource/747/08/>.
In your Works Cited list, you need to alphabetize the sources by the authors' last names. If there is no author, then you alphabetize by the first word of the title (not counting a, an, or the).
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/
Read the instructions on this page. Read from Listing author names on down.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/
But I have done that, right?
It looks right except for < that is missing before the URL. You have the > at the end, but you also need < at the beginning.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08/
Well, I take that back!
Why do you have the URL in there twice?
Thanks! I think he meant that I have to capitalize the first letter in the website.
When your teacher asks you to alphabetize your sources, they are referring to organizing your sources in alphabetical order according to the author's last name. If the source does not have an author, you would use the title to determine the alphabetical order.
In the example you provided, the source appears to be a web page from the Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL). To alphabetize this source, you would look for the author's last name. In this case, since there is no specific author mentioned, you would use the first meaningful part of the citation as the basis for alphabetization.
This particular source does not have an author mentioned, so you would start by looking at the first meaningful part of the citation, which is "MLA Works Cited: Electronic Sources (Web Publications)." Since this is a long title, you would consider the first significant word or words to determine the alphabetical order. In this case, "MLA" would be the most appropriate comparison point.
Next, you would compare it to the other sources you have and place it in the correct alphabetical order. For example, if you have sources starting with "APA," "Chicago," and "MLA," the order would be:
- APA source
- Chicago source
- MLA source (in this case, the one you provided)
Once you have arranged all your sources in alphabetical order based on the author's last name or the first significant word in the title, you can then proceed to create your alphabetized list of sources, commonly known as a Works Cited page or a Bibliography page.