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Even less traditional sources like the ones on this page need to be cited. The Purdue Online Writing Lab is a great resource for MLA and APA.

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

Mission

The Purdue On-Campus Writing Lab and Purdue Online Writing Lab assist clients in their development as writers-no matter what their skill level-with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement. The Purdue Writing Lab serves the Purdue, West Lafayette, campus and coordinates with local literacy initiatives. The Purdue OWL offers global support through online reference materials and services.

A Message From the Assistant Director of Content Development

The Purdue OWL® is committed to supporting students, instructors, and writers by offering a wide range of resources that are developed and revised with them in mind. To do this, the OWL team is always exploring possibilties for a better design, allowing accessibility and user experience to guide our process. As the OWL undergoes some changes, we welcome your feedback and suggestions by email at any time.

Please don't hesitate to contact us via our contact page if you have any questions or comments.

All the best,

Garrett

Social Media

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Welcome to the Purdue Online Writing Lab

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.

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Social media is not just for the Kardashians.  There are a lot of great individuals and organizations that post informative and educational content on social media.
Example: The Wyss Institute at Harvard (@wyssinstitute on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook)

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Some nonprofit organizations and think-tanks publish survey results and statistics online.
Example: "Mobile Fact Sheet" by the The Pew Research Center

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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MORE FACT SHEETS: INTERNET/BROADBAND | SOCIAL MEDIA

In contrast to the largely stationary internet of the early 2000s, Americans today are increasingly connected to the world of digital information while "on the go" via smartphones and other mobile devices. Explore the patterns and trends that have shaped the mobile revolution below.

The vast majority of Americans - 96% - now own a cellphone of some kind. The share of Americans that own smartphones is now 81%, up from just 35% in Pew Research Center's first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011. Along with mobile phones, Americans own a range of other information devices. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults now own desktop or laptop computers, while roughly half now own tablet computers and roughly half own e-reader devices.

A substantial majority of Americans are cellphone owners across a wide range of demographic groups. By contrast, smartphone ownership exhibits greater variation based on age, household income and educational attainment.

Pew Research Center

Along with mobile phones, Americans own a range of other information devices. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults now own desktop or laptop computers, while roughly half now own tablet computers and roughly half own e-reader devices.

Pew Research Center

A growing share of Americans now use smartphones as their primary means of online access at home. Today roughly one-in-five American adults are "smartphone-only" internet users - meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have traditional home broadband service.

Pew Research Center

Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among younger adults, non-whites and lower-income Americans.

Find more in-depth explorations of the impact of mobile adoption by following the links below.

Mobile Technology and Home Broadband 2019 June 13, 2019
Digital gap between rural and nonrural America persists Digital divide persists even as lower-income Americans make gains in tech adoption May 7, 2019 Millennials stand out for their technology use, but older generations also embrace digital life May 2, 2018
About a quarter of U.S. adults say they are 'almost constantly' online March 14, 2018
Nearly one-in-five Americans now listen to audiobooks March 8, 2018
A third of Americans live in a household with three or more smartphones May 25, 2017
Tech Adoption Climbs Among Older Adults May 17, 2017

All reports and blog posts related to mobile technology.

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Demographics of Mobile Device Ownership and Adoption in the United States

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MORE FACT SHEETS: INTERNET/BROADBAND | SOCIAL MEDIA In contrast to the largely stationary internet of the early 2000s, Americans today are increasingly connected to the world of digital information while "on the go" via smartphones and other mobile devices. Explore the patterns and trends that have shaped the mobile revolution below.

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A podcast is a digital audio broadcast that you can listen to online or by downloading it onto a mobile device.
Example: "This American Life" by National Public Radio

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Recently Aired
View archive

Turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, fowl of all kinds-real and imagined-and their mysterious hold over us.

Things our dads taught us, whether they intended to or not.

What happens when you realize the people in charge don't have the answers.

Recommended

Sign up for our newsletter for weekly news and updates.

Visit our store for shirts, posters, tote bags, and more.

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Turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, fowl of all kinds-real and imagined-and their mysterious hold over us.

Things our dads taught us, whether they intended to or not.

What happens when you realize the people in charge don't have the answers.

"When I'm trying to explain our program to someone who doesn't know it, I stammer a bunch of words like 'entertaining,' 'funny,' 'surprising plot twists,' 'true stories but not boring I swear' ... and then I just give them this list." - Ira Glass

View this list

Yes we have videos! Animations, music videos, speeches, our live stage shows, and more.

View this list

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A weekly public radio program and podcast. Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme.

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Whether you find it through Netflix, Hulu, or cable, there are a lot of educational television programs out there, especially for history and science.
Example: "Brainchild" on Netflix

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Watch Brainchild | Netflix Official Site

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From germs and emotions to social media and more, it's the science of your world explained in a way that's refreshingly relatable. Watch trailers & learn more.

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What if you want to study the lyrics or music for a particular song?  Maybe you want to include music in a presentation.  Music is usually copyright protected; however, there are resources that can help you find music that is in the public domain.
Example: musopen.org

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Free Sheet Music, Royalty Free & Public Domain Music | Musopen

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Download royalty free music and sheet music in PDF for free. We are a non-profit with the largest selection of public domain music and educational resources.

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A documentary is a film that is produced to inform or raise awareness on a focused topic, person, or event.
Example: "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" by Ken Burns

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Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales- from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska- THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA'S BEST IDEA is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background-rich and poor, famous and unknown, soldiers and scientists, natives and newcomers, artists and entrepreneurs- who were willing to devote themselves to saving some precious portion of the land they loved and in doing so reminded their fellow citizens of the full meaning of democracy.

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Filmed over the course of more than six years at some of nature's most spectacular locales- from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska- THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICA'S BEST IDEA is nonetheless a story of people: people from every conceivable background-rich and poor, famous ...

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Many individuals, organizations, and schools post educational videos or documentaries online.
Example: "Seeing a Black Hole with a Planet-Sized Telescope | STELLAR" by the PBS program, "It's Okay to Be Smart."

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Seeing a Black Hole with a Planet-Sized Telescope | STELLAR

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When you cannot make it to the physical museum, many museums post online  collections where you can find some of their most famous pieces.
Example: Vincent Van Gough's "Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat" a The Met in New York City

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum

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Vincent van Gogh | Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler) | The Met

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private collection, Asnières (possibly comtesse Clara Levaillant de La Boissière and her daughter Eugénie Jeanne Levaillant de La Boissière, Asnières, later elsewhere), gift of the artist ca.

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Oral presentations can include live or recorded speeches, presentations, or lectures.

Example: "Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator" Ted Talk by Tim Urban

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Inside the mind of a master procrastinator

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Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn’t make sense, but he’s never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done. In this hilarious and insightful talk, Urban takes us on a journey through YouTube binges, Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window -- and encourages us to think harder about what we’re really procrastinating on, before we run out of time.

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An online forum is a website where users can participate in discussions on specialized topics.

Example: Honda Dirt Bike Forum

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CRFHQ.com is an exclusive Honda CRF Forum dedicated to discussions of all Honda Dirt Bikes including the CRF450, CRF250, CRF230, CRF150, CRF110, CRF100, and CRF80.

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You might conduct an interview in person or you might use a published interview.

Example: The Paris Review interview of poet Billy Collins.

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The big news, of course, is that Billy Collins has been appointed the new poet laureate by the Library of Congress, now the newest of a distinguished list that among others includes Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Pinsky, and most recently, Stanley Kunitz.

Collins's credentials, despite starting a career as a poet at the late age of forty, are impressive indeed. His various wonderfully named collections of poetry include Video Poems, Pokerface, Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, The Apple That Astonished Paris, Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes and Picnic, Lightning. Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems will be published this fall. His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. A well-known voice on National Public Radio, his public readings, perhaps better described as performances, are invariably put on before packed audiences.

His work is identified largely by its humor, which he speaks of as being "a door into the serious"-a comment echoed by John Updike's sentiment: "Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . limpid, gently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides."

Collins lives in Somers, New York, a few miles from Katonah, which is about an hour's ride on the commuter train from Grand Central Station. The Katonah station is unique in that it is set in the middle of town, so that one steps out of the train just a yard or so from the main street and the arts and crafts shops that line the far side. Collins's home, a few miles away, is a renovated farmhouse that dates back to the 1860s. His wife, Diane, was away at work (she is an architect), but on hand was the family dog, Jeannine, a mixed breed collie named after a song popularized by Cannonball Adderly. Collins often breaks away from work to play Adderly-mode jazz on a piano in the living room.

Jeannine made it clear she wanted to be taken outside for exercise-which entailed running down a steep slope of lawn to retrieve a frazzled-looking frisbee, so indented with teeth marks as to resemble (as Collins put it) "the end of a worried writer's pencil." Jeannine finally seemed wearied enough to allow Collins to invite his guest back in the house for the interview.

In manner, Billy Collins is very much like what one would expect from reading his poems-quick to add a touch of humor to whatever he has to say, however serious the topic, but leaving no doubt that he is a very dedicated practitioner of his art. He teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York; one envies his students for their chance to study comparative literature from such a source. And yet there is nothing of the formal Ivory Tower mien about Collins: he is, for example, a passionate golfer, and what time he can take off from the lecture circuit (he is in considerable demand, giving over forty readings a year) and his teaching duties at Lehman, he spends touring the historic golf courses of the country with his golfing friend and literary agent, Chris Calhoun. Perhaps his informal side is best reflected by his given name: he was christened William after his father, thus Willy for a while, and then Billy, which he has kept as his nom de plume as much in reaction to the pretentiousness of those writers who use their initials, or one initial and a given name, as in W. James Collins, or whatever.

The interview took place in the small comfortable study of his home-shelves of books, a pair of paintings, one an abstract by Dan Christensen, the other a 1930s subway scene by George Tooker.

BILLY COLLINS

I'd like to get something straightened out at the beginning: I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

INTERVIEWER

Well, that's certainly the kind of information we're after, but can you tell us about the actual making of what you send out? Could you go through the genesis of a poem?

COLLINS

There's a lot of waiting around until something happens. Some poets like David Lehman and William Stafford set out on these very willful programs to write a poem a day. They're extending what Catullus said about "never a day without a line." But most poets don't write a poem a day. For me it's a very sporadic activity. Until recently, I thought "occasional poetry" meant that you wrote only occasionally. So there's a lot of waiting, and there's a kind of vigilance involved. I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times-and this, I think, is a sense you develop-I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum-the poem finds a reason for continuing. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it's tone that establishes the poet's authority. The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don't know where I'm going. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You're trying to discover something that you don't know exists, maybe something of value.

INTERVIEWER

What inspires that first line? Is it something you see? Is it a passing thought, a line of someone else's work?

COLLINS

There can be remote influences, but I think the line itself comes out of talking to yourself. It's a matter of paying attention to the detritus that floats through your head all the time-little phrases that through your own self-talking, your talk monitor, sometimes pop up. Also, I try to start the poem conversationally. Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. What I do with the reader later can be more complicated, but the beginning of the poem is a seductive technique for me, a way of making a basic engagement. Then I hope the poem gets a little bit ahead of me and the reader.

INTERVIEWER

What about revision?

COLLINS

I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done. Most of these poems have a kind of rhetorical momentum. If the whole thing doesn't come out at once, it doesn't come out at all. I just pitch it.

INTERVIEWER

You throw it out?

COLLINS

People say, Don't throw anything away. This is standard workshop advice: Always save everything. You could use it in another poem. I don't believe that. I say, Get rid of it. Because if it got into a later poem it would be Scotch-taped on. It would not be part of the organic, you know, chi, the spine that the poem has, the way it all should be one continuous movement.

INTERVIEWER

What was that word you used?

COLLINS

Chi. I think they use that in feng shui. It's the Chinese sense of energy that runs through things. Poems that lack that seem very mechanically put together, like a piece here and a part there. Because of the workshop and the M.F.A. phenomenon there's much too much revision going on. Revision can grind a good impulse to dust. Of course, the distinction between revision and writing is kind of arbitrary because when I am writing I am obviously revising. And when I revise, I'm writing, aren't I? I love William Matthews's idea-he says that revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party! That's the fun of it, making it right, getting the best words in the best order.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us about growing up, your family?

COLLINS

Both of my parents were born in 1901 and both lived into their nineties, the two of them just about straddling the century. My father was from a large Irish family from Lowell, Massachusetts, a mill town, incidentally Kerouac's birthplace and the site of his first novel. I've never been to Lowell, but I was just invited by an editor of a magazine to go up there and write about my father and look at the Jack Kerouac place. I have a poem called "Lowell," which is about the coincidence of my father being born in the same town as Jack Kerouac. You couldn't find two more disparate characters. The end of the poem says something like, He would have told Neal Cassady to let him out at the next light.

My mother was born on a farm in Canada. She was the one who taught me to read by reading to me. I have a feeling that was one of the most important experiences of my life. At some point I could read by myself, but I didn't want to be weaned away from that-I wanted to be read to. I have a secret theory that people who are addicted to reading are almost trying to recreate the joy, the comfortable joy of being read to as a child by a parent or a friendly uncle or an older sibling. Being read to as a child is one of the great experiences in life. Of course, I was always fascinated by the ability to read, and I'll make this confession: before I could read, I pretended I could. My parents would have company over at our house, and I would get out a volume of Compton's Encyclopedia, at the age of four or five, and sit there in an armchair and pretend to be reading-I would look very studious. I was the youngest phony in America. My parents would wink at their friends and, thinking that I had taken everybody in, I'd head off to bed.

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The big news, of course, is that Billy Collins has been appointed the new poet laureate by the Library of Congress, now the newest of a distinguished list that among others includes Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Pinsky, and most recently, Stanley Kunitz. Collins’s credent...