The evidence generally comes from other sources because essentially, the business of academic writing requires us to mold, reflect and respond to other scholars' work. It also requires us to take a position on the debate at hand or an existing set of ideas. New ideas are entirely original. They are often inspired by other thinkers in the field. Our ideas add to or encounter to what has been said or thought before in order to take the knowledge forward. In other words, the business of academic writing is a creative process of knowledge making, drawing on what others have said before. As Isaac Newton once said, If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. It comes as no wonder then that knowledge making through writing is a collaborative project, one that is done together with others. These other voices need to be acknowledged. This is what is known as referencing. Referencing is the act of giving due credit to those other scholars and giants that have inspired you in your work. Even if you do not quote them directly, you still need to acknowledge or reference them. Failure to reference is often equated to theft of ideas or plagiarism and is a punishable offense. Plagiarism has often marred the reputation of renowned academics. So just spend some time recording your sources because it is after all a matter of academic honesty. How to reference? You may ask. Well, the most obvious feature in the reference is the name of the author who has shared this idea. References are only provided in the text as in-text references and at the end of the document as a reference list. Obviously, the in-text reference cannot be too long or else it will disrupt the reading flow. So the in-text reference would provide usually the name of the author and the year in which the book was published. On the other hand, the reference list, at the end, would furnish all the details about the source. There are different referencing styles such as Harvard or Chicago, for example. You will need to format your references in a specific way depending on the style required by your department or institution, which you will need to check. Common to all these styles are the five key elements, author, date, title, publication place and publisher. Ensure that your reference list contains these and be consistent in your referencing style throughout your essay. On this course, we will teach you the Harvard style of referencing, also known as the Author-date method. So the two key elements here are the author and the year of publication. The in-text reference looks like this, (Addis, 2011). If you're quoting a particular section, then you will need to provide the page number as well. For example, "From an early age, Suu Kyi was surrounded by people of varying backgrounds." (Addis, 2011:157). Where 157 is the page number where the quote was found. Now that we understand referencing a bit better, let us see how our student writers tackle the writing of their paragraphs.