Help me submit my assignment (Harvard & house style)

[highlandshortbread]

Hi, I want to go back to university as a mature student. And study my final year (top up degree).

The course manager said it should be fine but has asked me to do an assignment so he knows that I’m suitable for the course. I really enjoyed the assignment and could have easily done 10,000 words on the subject (he chose the subject!).

But I am more nervous about Harvard referencing and following the “house style” and submitting the paper than anything else.

I’ve done my Harvard reference list. And numbered them and have included the same numbering throughout the essay. I followed the instructions (similar to what I did before anyway) but am so worried about getting it wrong. For example I have done it like this but won’t include this actual website address. [1]

Reference List

1. (Mumsnet 2020 “Help me submit my assignment” available at www.examplesandbiscuits.com Accessed on 5 August 2020)

Is that the right way? Just feeling nervous!

I always thought that Harvard was unnumbered so in text it would be (Highland Shortbread, 2020) and then in the refs:

Highland Shortbread (2020) Mumsnet etc. Journal of classic wittering 2(1).

So notes would be numbered but not refs - they might have asked you to have used a slightly different version though in fairness.

I believe it should be-
Mumsnet, 2020 [Online] “Help me submit my assignment” - in ITALICS . Available at: www.examplesandbiscuits.com. [Accessed on 5 August 2020]

No need for the brackets either side for a reference list

@ChristopherTracy It’s definitely the “in text” thing that’s confusing me the most.

Would I look like an idiot if I emailed the course manager to clarify? I am not currently a student yet (as I’ll only get accepted if my assignment is good) so I don’t have access to the University Harvard guide.

I am mid 30s and feel like I’ve regressed to 18!

As you're adding your references within the text as footnotes then these will have to be numbered.

You don't number if your bibliography is at the end as you're citing the reference within the text.

Footnotes are far better.

This is really useful:

subjects.library.manchester.ac.uk/referencing/referencing-harvard

Do they do full Harvard or is it a variation of it? We do "UniversityNameHarvard" which most of the staff usually comment on in a mildly pisstaking tone of voice to be honest.

Let me find our uni's guidance (which is pretty decent to be fair)

For in-text I have from my induction notes (I think I was losing the will to live by this point):
"Something something something (HCPC, 2013) something something something."

Then in the reference list (as you've referred to it directly in the text it goes in there):
For books-
AUTHOR(S) (Year) Title . Edition-if not the 1st . Place of publication: Publisher.
e.g. CLARKE, S . (2011) Textile design . London: Laurence King.

For online stuff-

AUTHOR(S) (Year) Title of document . [Type of resource] Organisation responsible (optional) . Available from: web address [Accessed date].

If you don't know the date you put (n.d.)
e.g. NHS (2016) Mobile phone safety . [Online] NHS . Available from: www .nhs .uk/conditions/ Mobile-phone-safety/Pages/Introduction .aspx [Accessed 28/06/16] .

Then we've been told to do bibliography separately as anything else we've read for the assignment that isn't directly referenced in the text.

That's my uni's tweaked Harvard style though - if you google up the place you're applying to and referencing guidelines there's bound to be something online - I have my uni's guide saved to my PC and invariably have it open when I'm doing assignments because I can never remember how to do it - this is my second degree but my first one used footnotes style referencing (or as I mentally term it Terry Pratchett Referencing)

Thanks everyone! Very interesting isn’t it...

The assignment brief just said “standard Harvard”

But I have swallowed my pride and emailed the course manager.

Hopefully I don’t seem like a useless pleb

I use citethisforme . Its about 8 quid per month. Its not perfect and I do have to make amendments (following Cite Them Right) but oh my goodness what a game changer.

I use mybib (I think!) which is similar to cite this for me & it tells me how to cite in-text. I just do as I’m told

@Northernsoullover and @paddingtonbearsmarmalade I am going to look into this! Thanks

I used a bibliography manager called zotero which was free. Would highly recommend it. Took all the stress out of references!

@Nacreous Amazing!! Do the universities ever mention it? Do they ever give feedback about the references?

I got told about it as part of my disabled students assessment, and it had an add in for word so it all just looked like normal referencing. I hadn't heard about it before then, but no one made any comments about it.

You just clicked when you wanted to an insert a reference, picked the relevant paper from the list you made (which you could do directly from the web browser for journal articles) and then it added the reference in. You selected the referencing style you wanted. Haven't used it for several years though as I'm not in academia anymore.

Refs as footnotes or endnotes is very common in law, literature and history (and of course STEM subjects) but much less so in sociology disciplines. They would normally follow the standard non numbered Harvard version.

Do they ever give feedback about the references?

I feel like I spend half my life giving feedback about references. I tell a student their references are formatted incorrectly and I write out three or four in full in the correct format. Then they submit their final draft in which the references are still formatted incorrectly.

The thing is, by producing a reference list at all they are claiming to have read all the articles in the list, so how come they're incapable of typing references in anything resembling the form of those in the cited articles?

To be fair, the system of academic referencing is a bit arcane. Why do you have to include the city the publisher of a book is based in, especially as this can be nearly impossible to find for modern books? And why do most reference formats not allow you to cite a single chapter or range of pages from a book that isn't an edited, multi-author work? It makes book references pretty pointless.

Crikey I hate Harvard because there are so many variations of it. Very slight differences but these differences have to be adhered to. I don't think I've ever heard of a standard Harvard, most institutions have guides on 'how to' for their particular way of using it.

Give me APA any day. In text is literally (BOB, 2020) more than one author (Bill and Bob, 2020) three (Bill, Bob and Ben, 2020). More than three is et all (Bob et all, 2020).

The examples I gave are for Harvard not APA btw.

It's the bibliography where it gets stupidly complicated.

(Bob et al., 2020) I actually think Harvard is relatively straightforward especially compared to the references that have random journal title shortenings.

I used the book Cite it Right through university which sets out all of the different media and how to reference them correctly with Harvard

I used the book Cite it Right through university which sets out all of the different media and how to reference them correctly with Harvard

I use Mendeley and its citation manager in Word - it offers several flavours of Harvard. My university states Cite Them Right Harvard for undergraduates and then all guidance disappears for postgrads so I just carried on using CTR Harvard...

Aye, autocorrect changed al to all. And I actually got graded down for using a full stop and a comma in one assignment. This is what I meant by subtle but important differences based on the variation the institution uses.

In fact I did two pieces of work weighted 50% each, same format, different questions. First piece graded first class, second graded second class. When I asked why, this was the reason I was given.

I don't know why APA clicks for me and I can do it without thinking and why Harvard is something I really have to think carefully about.

Actually, it's probably because I've used Harvard in five separate academic years in three different places and they all varied in how they were used.

APA is just APA. It doesn't change and is more straightforward.

Thanks for the replies! I have submitted the paper now and now I’m very very nervous.

As soon as I submitted I thought “oh no! it’s crap! It’ll look like a 10 year old wrote it!”

Thank you everyone who helped me! I’ve officially been accepted on the course after submitting my assignment

Cannot believe it!