Get a head start at University

Posted on 3 Jul 2009 at 11:00

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Beware of the spellchecker, too. If you're not careful, it will change all the words that it doesn't recognise, including foreign-language words and those in a specialist vocabulary.

References

References show the reader where your ideas came from. If you forget to use them, you may be accused of plagiarism - a serious crime in academia. For a first offence, you can expect the essay to be downgraded by a degree class (from a 2:1 to a 2:2, for example). Thereafter, penalties become increasingly more serious, culminating with expulsion from your degree course. So always make a reference, and do so properly.

How you handle this will depend on the referencing system used by your department. Many departments prefer the Harvard system, which doesn't use footnotes. Instead, you place your reference, in brackets, within the text. There are lots of guides to the Harvard system online, such as the one provided by the University of East Anglia at http://tinyurl.com/hrefguide.

Other departments still use the traditional numbered reference system with footnotes at the bottom of the page. If yours does, you can use Word's insert reference feature. In Word, place the cursor where you want the footnote's number reference to appear. From the Insert menu, go to Reference and choose Footnote. A superscripted number will appear next to the appropriate point in the essay, while your cursor will move to the bottom of page, below a newly inserted horizontal rule. Type your footnote here.

Bibliographical tools

You also need to think about your bibliography. Happily, some tools will help with this and can also handle citations within the text - the best known is Endnote. Just enter the details of any text you use into Endnote. When writing your essay, place the cursor where you need a citation in the Word document and use the Endnote toolbar to search your database of reference works. When you find the title, click Insert and Endnote places a formatted reference in your text and an entry into your essay's bibliography. The catch is that Endnote costs £150.

Alternatively, there's Zotero, which is a Firefox plugin. It does almost exactly what Endnote can, allowing you to build databases or web pages, journal articles and books. It comes with plugins for Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer that allow you to insert references and build bibliographies at the click of a button. You can download it from www.zotero.org.

Special characters

Language and linguistics students, among others, need to use characters that aren't on the standard UK keyboard. In Word, you can enter special characters by clicking on the Insert menu, choosing Symbol and simply clicking on the character you need, but this is a bit slow. It's actually quicker to use ASCII codes. You enter these by pressing the NumLock key, holding down the Alt key and then punching in the numbers for your special character on the number pad. There is a quick reference page at www.scribble-count.com.

The catch here is that most students use laptops and hardly any laptops have number pads. Fortunately, Word has a set of custom key codes that don't use the number pad. To use these, you press a combination of the Ctrl, Shift and special character keys, followed by the vowel you wish to accent. The codes are as follows: