The reference page

Having read a number of books from childhood (I meant academic textbooks and not novels, which always stay far far away from me), never thought about whats behind writing a reference page. 'Reference page' was one thing I was never bothered to even look at. To be honest, the frequency of getting rid of a reference page would be faster than the other boring pages of a book.

Whats with a reference page? Here are the truths about it. Plagiarism is a very popular term related to writings. An author has to be creative enough in not imitating other person's work. For this, one has to mention the sources from where the information is taken from. And this is precisely gathered in a reference page. A reference page will look like this:

References:

1. Vasan, A. (2010, Apr 16). The City of Atlanta. Retrieved from http://anuradhafeels.blogspot.com/2010/04/city-of-atlanta.html

Notice the number of full stops and commas and their placements in between terms. If one goes wrong, the format is wrong. And did you know that there are different formats for book references, article references, journal references and much more. I have mentioned reference of an article in a website. I am still confused with italics and dates. Imagine the case of researchers who involve even hundreds of references in their thesis and research papers. Only 'format' specialists can spot the mistakes in these reference papers, like how my grammar instructor used to spot grammatical errors in my technical papers in school.

And what is the essence of blogging about references pages. What has it got to do with me and blogs. Oh yes, it has to do a lot here. As writers, we tend to write a lot about 'stuff'. While some are creative, some other are references. And I support quoting or reminding other people's thoughts such that great ideas reach a wider audience through people who spread them. As I already mentioned before, if the writer supports non-plagiarism, then a reference page in the bottom of the article is always better. To write a reference page it is important to follow the rules.