Email & Instant Messages
MLA:
Donahue, Tiane. “Re: Your WPA Question.” Email to the author. 14 Dec 2004.
[author.] [“title or subject line.”] [type of posting and recipient.] [message date.]APA:
Do not include in list of References. Cite in your paper as a personal communication.Chicago:
25. Tiane Donahue, “Re: Your WPA Question,” email message to author,
[fn. #.] [author full name, “subject heading,”] [type of message,]
December 14, 2000.
[date of message.]
[Note: Chicago style footnotes give full information for private messages, but does not list them in the Bibliography.]
It’s probably obvious that the authority of material that comes in private communications varies greatly with the status of the source. What someone writes to you by email or IM may be useful as a source of opinion, but can seldom be relied on as definitive information, unless you’re in correspondence with a recognized expert. And even in these cases, the informality of email makes most authors much less careful about checking facts and conclusions, rendering the information less authoritative. Most email messages should probably be treated as popular rather than scholarly sources. See Scholarly vs. Popular Sources for more information.
Note: Most people consider email to be private. Even if the message is sent to more than one recipient, a decent respect for privacy suggests that you secure the sender’s permission before making the material public. If you received the message as a forward, the obligation to seek permission is even more urgent, as the original author likely has no reason to expect you to use the message in your own work. See Special Demands of Internet Sources for more information.
If you do use material from an email or IM, the format for listing in MLA style is fairly simple, as in the example above: Author, Subject, “Email to the author,” and Date.
In APA style, you do not include in your list of References any source that can’t be retrieved by your reader. If you use email in your paper, cite it as a personal communication in your text, and do not list it at the end. For Chicago style, private messages are given full citation in a footnote, but not included in the Bibliography.
Note: As discussed in the section on How To Quote, it’s often useful to identify your source in the body of your paper (and not just in your citation or footnote); this identification is especially important when you use private messages. If you give a sense of what kind of source you’re using, the reader will be better able to understand the context of your evidence. See Special Demands of Internet Sources for more information.
Note, also: You may notice that listing Internet sources often takes more time and care than listing print sources. Since the authorship and location of Web sources are harder to establish, readers need even more information in order to assess sources and to retrieve them for further study. See Special Demands of Internet Sources for more information.
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