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Not all of one's writing can completely reinvent the wheel. Very rarely are completely new ideas introduced in any manner without first building off the work of others. This is why we use citations, the crediting of another author when you use their creation in any fashion to base your own stance. Not only is it courteous to the author (while also helping the legality of your piece), citing your sources and giving credit where credit is due can help the overall cohesiveness of your writing. For example, if you decided to write an editorial on why GMOs in foods are detrimental to your health and you included no citations, well, I don’t know anything about GMOs and if you include no outside sources to corroborate your theory, I now still know nothing about GMOs, I have no reason to believe anything you’ve said, and you’ve effectively wasted my time. The moral of the story is that if you use citations effectively, you can make yourself more credible on your topic by giving the reader access to your sources to decide for themselves if your argument is valid.

Here at Creatively Decisive, we’ll use a modified Chicago style citation system mainly because it retains the integrity of a classic citation, but without the nonsensical formatting that MLA and APA have. We’ll also link out to our sources that have links to use, since that probably makes sense to you internet wandering blog readers — you found this page after all. But really though, we’ll link to what we can, having a proper citation makes no sense if you can just link to it all the same. However, if you’re into vintage stuff, all the sources, linked or not, will be in Chicago style at the bottom of the post for your fact checking enjoyment.