7.6 Workplace vs. Academic Citation

In the workplace, you may often find yourself using your colleague’s words without crediting them. For example, your boss might ask you to write a grant application using text from previous grant applications. Many people might work on the same document, or you might update a document written by someone else.

In the workplace, your employer usually owns the writing you produce, so workplace writing often doesn’t cite individual authors (though contributors are usually named in an Acknowledgements section if it’s a large project/report). That doesn’t mean that you should take credit for someone else’s work, but in general, a lot of sharing and remixing goes on within an organization.

For example, say that you work in HR and have been asked to launch a search for a new IT manager. You might use a template to design the job posting or update copy of the ad you posted the last time you hired someone for this role. No one would expect you to create an entirely new job posting just because it was originally written by someone who’s left the company.

That said, writers in the workplace often use a wide range of sources to build their ethos. Citation is not only an ethical practice, but it is also a great persuasive strategy. The citation practices you learn in school will serve you well in the workplace.

In schools in North America, the context is different. Your instructor has given you an assignment to evaluate how well you can perform skills like integrating research, citing, quoting and paraphrasing. Unless your instructor tells you otherwise, they will assume that you wrote everything in your assignment unless you use quotation marks.

Attribution

“Workplace vs. Academic Citation” from Business Writing For Everyone by Arley Cruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.