Week 11 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 11 — Document Your Sources: Audit a Machine's List, Then Build Your Own — Traditional alternative (no AI)

English Composition Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — audit a chatbot's works-cited list on format and on facts, then build MLA ninth-edition entries and in-text citations for two real sources of your own.

This week you learned to document sources in MLA style, ninth edition: the in-text citation in the author-page form, the works-cited entry built on the template of core elements, the container, the formatting of the paper and the list, the matched-pair rule, and the two-level audit of any machine-made entry. In Week 9 you chose and judged sources; in Week 10 you brought them into your sentences with signal phrases. This week you show a reader exactly where each one came from. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Writing Studio practise the same moves from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together on sources you actually use.

The task

Part A — audit a chatbot's works-cited list. A student asked a chatbot to "make an MLA works-cited list for my essay on phones in lecture classes." Here is the kind of list a chatbot might return. It was written for this course to contain mistakes; it is not a real chatbot's output, and it is attributed to no one. The four sources are the running draft's real sources, so you can check every element against Chapter 11 and against the sources themselves.

Heading: References
Entry 1: Beland, Louis-Philippe, and Richard Murphy. "Ill Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance." Labour Economics, vol. 14, 2018, pp. 61–76.
Entry 2: Amy, Jeff. "A majority of U.S. states now have laws banning or regulating cellphones in schools." 21 May 2025, www.pbs.org/newshour/education/a-majority-of-u-s-states-now-have-laws-banning-or-regulating-cellphones-in-schools.
Entry 3: Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. 10th anniversary ed., W. W. Norton, 2020.
Entry 4: Department for Education. "Mobile Phones in Schools." GOV.UK, 29 June 2026, www.gov.uk/government/publications/mobile-phones-in-schools.
The chatbot's suggested in-text citation for the running draft's quotation: (Beland and Murphy, 61)

Of the 4 entries, 1 drops its container and sets its title in sentence case, and 1 gives the wrong volume and year and leaves out the DOI; say how many entries can stay as they are, and how you got that number. Then run the two-level audit on the whole list. For the format level, check every entry against the template of core elements and name each fault; also check the heading, the order of the entries, and the suggested in-text citation. For the facts level, open the sources (or use Chapter 11's pinned entries) and name each element that does not match. Then write the corrected list in full, with the right heading and order, and the corrected in-text citation.

Part B — document two sources of your own. Choose two real sources you found or used in Weeks 9 and 10. If you do not have two yet, find two credible sources on one topic from this course's list: a four-day class schedule, a campus parking or transit change, the dining hall's hours, a community library's hours, a workplace's meeting policy, or the use of AI in the writing classroom. At least one of your sources must sit inside a container, such as an article on a news site, an article in a journal, or a page on a larger website. The MLA template has 9 core elements, and a journal-article entry with a volume, a page range, and a DOI uses 6 of them; say how many elements that entry skips. For each of your two sources, write an element map: list the template's nine elements in order and, beside each one, either the detail you copied from the source itself or the word "skip". Then write each works-cited entry from your map, with its punctuation. Next, write a short paragraph of 4–6 sentences of your own that uses both sources: introduce one with a signal phrase and give the other a parenthetical citation. Each citation uses the author-page form, or the name alone if the source has no pages. Finally, set up a works-cited page for the two entries with MLA's heading, alphabetical order by first element, a half-inch hanging indent, and titles in title case, and describe your running head in one sentence (your last name and the page number, upper right).

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker is writing a short safety report for your workplace and says, "The links are already in my report, so I don't need a list of sources at the end." Write a 3–5 sentence message that tells them, in everyday words, what a reader gains from a pointer in the sentence plus a full entry at the end, and why the first word of each has to match. Name one honest limit — for example, that a list only helps if each entry has been checked against the real source. Explain any term your coworker might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who shares a recipe in a family newsletter and writes only "from a cooking site." Model answer: "Say which recipe you mean and where it lives, so your cousin can find the same one: the dish's name, the cook who wrote it, the site that published it, and the date. Put the cook's name next to the recipe too, so a reader can match it to the full details at the bottom. That way nobody has to guess, and the cook gets the credit. It only works if you copy those details from the page itself, not from memory."

Use that pattern for your coworker, with your own explanation of what you learned this week.

Reflect on your revision

After you revise your first draft, answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which element in your own entries changed most between your drafts, and what did you find on the source itself that made you change it?
(b) Which fault in the chatbot's list would you have missed without the facts level of the audit, and how will you check for it in your next essay?

Check your own draft

Before you write your second draft, check your first one against the attached scoring criteria, criterion by criterion: beside every element in each map, write where on the source you found it; trace each in-text citation to the first word of its entry and mark it "matches" or "does not match"; and check your page for the heading, the order, the hanging indent, and title case. Then revise.

Deliverables

Submit in the assignment entry: the Part A audit with your count and how you got it, and the corrected list and citation; your two element maps with your count of skipped elements, and your two entries; your paragraph; your works-cited page with the sentence describing your running head; your message to your coworker; and your reflection, with the first-draft element or sentence you changed and the revised version beside it. Each part may be written, or recorded as audio or video with a transcript; every form is graded by the same scoring criteria.

Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

The audit, the corrected list, the element maps, the entries, the paragraph, the message, and the reflection must be your own words. This version of the assignment asks for no chatbot at any step. Copy every author, title, date, page, and address from the source itself, never from a generator or from memory, and quote only words you have found in the real text.

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