Content planner and copywriter at TextPulse. Sara runs the blog day to day, from planning and drafting through to publishing. She writes the practical guides: clear explanations of academic writing problems, aimed at the person who actually has to hand something in.
Most UK universities never set one referencing style. The decision sits at department or module level, so the real answer lives in a handbook or library guide, not in a guess based on your subject.
MLA refuses to call ChatGPT an author, so a Works Cited entry for it opens with your own prompt instead. Here is the six-element order MLA actually uses, its own worked example, and the shortened-prompt form the in-text citation takes.
A rewriter that treats (Smith, 2020, p. 44) as ordinary prose will mangle it. Here is what actually breaks in APA, MLA and IEEE citations when a paragraph gets humanized, and what a citation-safe pass has to do differently.
A university AI policy rarely matches the one at the institution next door. This piece maps what five universities, five publishers, and the Committee on Publication Ethics actually say, with the wording quoted and the source named.
Most guides tell you to pick a topic, research it, then outline it, which is true and not very useful. Here is the same advice worked through one real example, from a vague idea to a finished outline, including the moment it forks into a hypothesis or a thesis statement.
Submitting a paper feels like sending it into a void, but a manuscript moves through a defined sequence of editorial decisions, each with its own real timeframe. Here is what actually happens between your submission and your first decision, stage by stage, and where most papers actually fail.