Ask OASISNontraditional Sources: Discussion Board Posts
Last updated 5/6/2020
Visual: Screen opens to a background image with a person typing on a laptop and a notebook and pencil, along with the Walden University Writing Center logo. The title Walden University Writing Center and tagline “Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears on the screen. The screen changes to show the series title “Nontraditional Sources” and the video title “Discussion Board Posts.”
Audio: Guitar music
Visual: Slide changes to one titled “Discussion Board Posts.” Body of slide reads as follows:
Westings, A. Y. (2013, February 12). Module 2 discussion [Discussion post]. Walden University Blackboard. https://class.waldenu.edu
Audio: You might find that when you are writing for one of your courses, you’d like to include ideas from one of your classmates. You might be writing a response to one of your classmates or you might be writing your assignment for the week, in which you’d like to refer to your classmate’s ideas. When doing so, it’s important that you still cite your classmate and the ideas they posted, and this is the way you would format your reference and citation to cite a classmate’s discussion board post.
First, list your classmate as the author with their last name and initials. Then, include the exact date of their post, with the year first and then the month and day. Next you’ll include the title of their post in sentence case and italicized, followed by the phrase “discussion post” in brackets. For the publication element of this entry, include the notation “Walden University Blackboard” and then this URL to the classroom login page.
Visual: The following citations are added to the slide: (Westings, 2013) or (Westings, 2013, para. 2)
Audio: To cite this post in the body of your paper, you’ll pull the author and just the year from the date element, saying “Westings, 2013”. If you were to quote from this post, you don’t have page numbers, so you’ll list the paragraph number to help the reader locate the passage.
And that’s it! That’s how you format your reference entry and citation when using a classmate’s discussion post in your own writing.
Visual: The screen changes to an ending slide a background image with a person typing on a laptop and a notebook and pencil, along with the Walden University Writing Center logo. The email address writingsupport@mail.waldenu.edu appears on the screen.