A while back, I wrote about Google alerts, and today I’m sharing another simple tool I find useful in my writing life.
easybib.com is an online bibliography creator. Whenever I start a new project, whether it’s a poetry collection, a nonfiction book, or even just a passage for an assessment company, I go to easybib.com and start a new list for that project. As I come across any reference I might possibly use, I enter it into easybib, and then when I need my bibliography to turn in with my project, easybib creates it for me.?MLA style is free; APA?and Chicago/Turabian are not–I’ve never?even heard of Turabian style.?Since I don’t write for academic journals, I’ve never had an editor ask for a bib in a specific style. They’re happy with any professional-looking, consistently structured bibliography?.
One thing I love is that it has AutoCite, which means you type in the ISBN of the book or the URL of the website, and it automatically fills in the rest. This works about 90% of the time. Cool!
A second thing I love is that it has so many options for type of source. No more looking up how to cite a television show, an interview, a public speech, etc.
And the third thing I love is the annotations box, where I often paste in the exact passages from the book or source. That makes fact-checking easier for the fact-checkers at the publisher, and it’s a quick and easy reference for me both for facts and for making sure I don’t word my own information too similarly to any of my original sources.
My kids use easybib, too, for their school projects. It’s really easy, which is the best recommendation I can give it.
(By the way, I have no financial interest in easybib.com, google.com–don’t I wish, etc. I’m just sharing the tools that I think make a writer’s life easier!)