Documentation Examples

Here are some examples of In-text citations as well as weaving those pesky quotes so that they become part of your essay:
In Northern Ireland, walls speak. First filled with public images of static, ritualized celebration and initially painted to mark the annual celebration of the Battle of the Boyne, the murals of Northern Ireland represent not only an act of Unionist celebration but also a dynamic process of partisan  (both Nationalist and Unionist) political protest and a search for peace. These murals invite engagement with viewers on both micro and macro levels  of discourse. Each mural presents the viewer with a discursive utterance  that employs the three classical branches of rhetoric—forensic (judicial), epideictic (identity construction), and deliberative (policy). Additionally, various aspects of proxemic, verbal, and nonverbal codes appear in the performance of a speech act as reaction, mimesis (imitation), or response to the utterances of other murals and current events. Various semiotic representations found within the rhetorical form of each mural contain both philosophical pairings  and interpretable signs, weak or strong, that encourage viewers to determine interpretable signs present. The pairings of mother/warrior, bullet/ballot, heroes/devils, myth/history, grief/celebration, and life/death represent the paradoxical nature of appearance and reality found in various semiotic representations within the murals. Semiotic interpretations of textual  and discursive elements (content) within the murals fluctuate contextually. As such, the interpretation of a particular visual code,  loaded with cultural specificity, contributes to a new understanding that may spiral Northern Ireland towards lasting peace.

The determination of the images found within the murals opens up opportunities for multiple interpretations. The various local versions of interpretation contain a number of intertextual and culturally specific references that are organized by “fields, axes, subsystems, and partial systems” that though “often not coherent with each other” have been “articulated according to specific cultural perspectives” or narratives (Eco 44). To make these specific references available to a larger audience, the Northern Irish communities have created a spectrum of restricted visual codes that limit meaning. Each of the restricted visual codes contains finite possibilities for each sign. Not only do these codes target and restrict both communal and cultural references for a localized audience but they also reduce possible interpretations for outside viewers.

Embedded with conflicting and culturally restricted codes, these semiotic representations depict hostile events. They also record ever increasing frustrations through a dialogic process that sets in motion a dynamic rhetorical process which requires reinterpretation of partisan struggles and the escalation of hostilities. These murals underscore Northern Ireland’s struggle towards establishing national identity through preselected details that limit or restrict their codes. Like the novel, a “phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice,” the murals confront viewers with representations of harmony and cacophony. The heteroglossic  force (centripetal and centrifugal) determines the “multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships” (Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” 261-63). Painted on the walls of Northern Ireland, these visual icons—unfurled flags, masked gunmen, prisoner portraits, or white larks—initiate a dynamic process (discursive, rhetorical, and semiotic) that articulates possibilities for both protest and peace in Northern Ireland.

Similar to the citizen activities found within the democratic polis  of ancient Greece, both sides of Northern Ireland’s conflict currently use quotidian sites that synthesize issues, fears, needs, and desires in the guise of murals. These representations blend past events with current issues and future dreams. The visual code records the language of these murals and spills images that open discourse to heighten community introspection and identification.

Through a politicization of public space, Neil Jarman notes that as artifacts these murals “create a new type of space, they redefine mundane public space” and “can be used to claim and define new politicised places as readily refining or restating old arguments on existing sites” (par. 15). Politically contextualized in location, use, and structure, these murals offer themselves readily to the Northern Irish communities as a mode of ancillary  rhetorical discourse. Filled with semiotic representations, the murals publicize problems, issues, and expectations that face a larger community divided by ideological, religious, and cultural isoglosses (boundaries) as well as the physically manifested boundaries—peacelines.  New activist murals, community and partisan alike, appear regularly to broadcast opinions about social and cultural issues that dominate the media headlines. These issues include parade routes, fair employment, arms decommissioning, political prisoners, and community security as well as the continued search for a lasting peace.

In ancient Greece, art fused culture instead of fragmenting and dividing social, political, and religious purposes. John Dewey postulates in Art as Experience that “the arts of drama, music, painting, and architecture . . . had no peculiar connection with teachers, galleries, museums. They were part of the significant life of an organized community”—the polis (7). The twentieth-century combination of political activism, civic orientation, and conceptual art  reflects the social turmoil of the early 1980s and furthers current discourse within Northern Ireland’s community murals and underscores Nina Felshin’s point that “activist cultural practices are typically collaborative” (11). These cultural practices contain a number of different process-oriented methodologies that involve community understanding and participation. Community artists are “‘distinguishable not by the techniques they use . . . but by their attitude towards the place of their activities in the life of society’” (Kelly 16). Community involvement, as well as the artwork’s public accessibility, functions as “a critical catalyst for change, a strategy with the potential to activate both individuals and communities” (Felshin 12). By extension, the process proposes community cohesion and synthesizes public opinion in order to codify rhetorics of peace and protest.

Works Cited

Here are some examples of various styles of bibliographical citations:
“The 1641 Rebellion.” Homestead. 15 May 2001 <http://www.nacms.homestead.com/1641~ns4.html>.

“A Brief History of Northern Ireland 1919-1999.” Guardian Unlimited Online—Special Report (online) 28 Jan. 1999. 1 Oct. 1999 <http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/

Northern_Ireland/Story/0,2763,209091,00.html>.

Adams, Gerry. “Looking to the Future.” CAIN Web Service. 13 Mar. 2001. U of Ulster. 12 Apr. 2002 <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ga221001.htm>.

 “An Overview of Events in the History of Ulster” Homestead. 15 May 2001 <http://www.nacms.homestead.com/overview~ns4.html>.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the State.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essay. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review P, 1971. 127-86.

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. George Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422.

---. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996. 60-102.

Balkin, Jack. M. A Night in the Topics: The Reason of Legal Rhetoric and the Rhetoric of Legal Reason. 20 Jan. 2001 <http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/

topics1.htm>.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

Bignell, Jonathan. Media Semiotics: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.

Bell, J. Boyer. The Irish Troubles: A Generation of Violence 1976-1992. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.


“The Billy Wright Murder.” BBC Online 14 Apr. 2002 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/northern_ireland/2000/maze_prison/1997.stm>.

Bitzer, Lloyd F. and Edwin Black, eds. The Prospect of Rhetoric: Report of the National Development Project. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

“The Battle of the Bogside.” Bloody Sunday Trust—Online Educational Resources. 12 Mar. 2001 <http://www.bloodysundaytrust.org/education/bob.htm>.

Boyce, D. George. Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Search for Stability. New Gill History of Ireland. Vol. 5. Dublin: Gill, 1990.

Breen, Suzanne. “Still Leader, But His Future Remains Uncertain.” The Irish Times on the Web 25 Jun. 2001. 18 Jul. 2001 <http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/

2001/0625/hom20.htm>.

---. “‘Very Bitter Pill’ for Families of Victims.” The Irish Times on the Web 25 Jul. 2000. 13 Nov. 2001 <http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2000/0725/

north9.html>.

Brunskill, Joan. “Prehistoric Cave Art Preserved by Sea.” Rev. of The Cave Beneath the Sea: Paleolithic Images at Cosquer by Jean Clottes and Jean Courtin and Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave by Jean-Marie Chauvet. The Dallas Morning News 13 May 1996: 7C.

Bryan, Dominic. “Drumcree: An Introduction to Parade Disputes.” Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. CAIN Web Service. 13 Mar. 2002  U of Ulster. 16 Mar. 2002 <http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/parade/bryan/bryan00.htm>.

Buckley, Anthony D. and Mary Catherine Kenny. Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Drama in Northern Ireland. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian IP, 1995.

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Towards History. 3rd. ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

---. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.