Stylebook Home ~ Works Cited ~ Plagiarism

Creating an Appendix for Charts, Graphs, Illustrations, Tables of Data

Sometimes you’ll refer in the body of your paper to map, or to a chart that shows some kind of statistics, or to the full text of a law or other document. Never include these things in the body of your paper. They take up too much room, and usually provide much more information than you need in that place at that time.

Perhaps you have found a graph that shows how many nuclear weapons each major country owned in 1950, 1960, and so on, up to 2000. But in your paper, you’re only comparing the United States and the Soviet Union. The line in your paper might look something like this:

Before 1950, only the United States and the Soviet Union possessed nuclear weapons. By 1960, the Soviet Union owned 35% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, while the United States owned 41%. (See Appendix A.)

At the end of your paper, following the body and the Works Cited page, you’ll include the full chart or graph that gave you these statistics, and at the top of the page, you’ll type the heading Appendix A. If you need more than one chart or graph, label each one Appendix A, Appendix B, and so on. These appendices are not always necessary, and may not be needed for the kind of paper you’re working on. They’re especially useful in papers written for science courses, where they can be used to display the results of any experiments that you’ve done.

At the bottom of the page on which the chart or graph appears, you will need to provide the citation for the source you used for the material. See the example in the sample paper if you’re unsure how to do this.

The pages in your appendices should be numbered in order as they appear. The appendices come after the Works Cited page.

Using quotations in your paper

It can be very difficult to use quotations correctly in your paper so that they fit in the way you want them to and say what you want them to say. Most high school research papers don’t need to use quotations at all, and they’re fine that way. Don’t feel that you should use quotations in a research paper unless your teacher tells you that it’s a requirement of the assignment.

Exception: Literary papers, such as those you write for English class about works of literature, usually do require the use of quotations.

If you do use a quotation, follow these guidelines:

• Use a quotation to highlight a point. You may have to show exactly how a law was written, or to show the exact words from a line in a poem to explain what the poem means. You may want to quote the exact words that a famous person said at a critical moment in history.

For example:

When President Roosevelt addressed the nation by radio and said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” most people felt comforted, and knew that the President would lead them through the worst times of the Depression.

• Don’t quote lines from your source just because you’re having trouble paraphrasing them. This is not how quotations should be used. If you need help paraphrasing, ask for help.

Bad example:

The men who fought in World War II were “very brave and dedicated to their purpose,” and should “rightfully be called The Greatest Generation.”

Good example:

The men who fought in World War II and who have come to be known as “The Greatest Generation” served with bravery and dedication.

• Use the exact words from the quotation as you found it in your source. If you need to make any changes, follow these rules:
   
  • If you want to use only part of a quotation and you need to leave out some words, use three dots, like this … in place of the words you took out. This is called an ellipsis.

An example of the original quotation:

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

Albert Einstein, 1946

An example of the quotation used in a sentence, with ellipsis:

Even Albert Einstein, whose theories had helped make the atomic bomb possible, was opposed to its use. In 1946, he said that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything …” and that it would cause our society to “ … drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

• Sometimes a quotation needs a little help from you to make it clearer. If you need to add something, enclose it in brackets like these [ ]. This shows that the material inside the brackets was added by you.

For example:

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Albert Einstein, 1949.

Maybe you’re not sure what “courting” means. You had to look it up and you think it won’t be clear the way it is. You might write it in your paper like this:

In 1949, Albert Einstein explained his theory of relativity by saying “When you are [dating] a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”

• Sometimes you will find a spelling error or another mistake of some kind in a quotation. You want to include it exactly as you found it, but you also want your teacher to know that you didn’t make the mistake yourself.

For example:

In 1946, Einstein rephrased his famous 1921 statement “God is subtle, but he is not malicious” by saying “God is slick, but he ain’t mean.”

You didn’t say ain’t, Einstein did. Will your teacher believe this? Only if you add the word sic in brackets at the site of the error. It should look like this:

In 1946, Einstein rephrased his famous 1921 statement “God is subtle, but he is not malicious” by saying “God is slick, but he ain’t [sic] mean.”

• Quotations have to be typed in a special way.
  • A short quotation (fewer than four lines long) is enclosed in double quotation marks [“] and is usually part of a sentence; it’s always part of a paragraph, as in the example above.
  • A long quotation is four lines long, or longer. This is typed as a separate block, set apart from the paragraph before it and from the paragraph that follows it. Don’t put quotation marks around a long quotation.
  • You can indent the whole thing by highlighting it and clicking the indent icon, or going to format paragraph. When you start a block quotation, indent the first line as if you’re starting a new paragraph. The whole block quotation is double-spaced, just like the rest of the paper.

For example:

Einstein was interested in more than his scientific theories. He was concerned that people would use them for personal gain or power, instead of using them to help people. He said that

Concern for man himself was his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors, concern for the great unsolved problems of the organization of labor and the distribution of goods – in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations. (Einstein 6)

Using quotation marks

1. Use single quotation marks for quotations that appear within quotations.
2. If a quotation itself ends with a question mark, or other punctuation, reproduce that within the closing quotation marks.
3. Commas or periods that separate quotations from the following text are included within the closing quotations, but other punctuation is not.

Churchill asked Roosevelt, "Will you be at Yalta?"

"I certainly will," responded Roosevelt.

Was there any doubt as to Stalin's "intent"?