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Homework Help - How Would You Cite This?

Butter!

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Butter!
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I need to cite this page - https://www.planetfitness.com/franchising/franchising-about-planet-fitness - as a source for a project, using the APA style. I'm a little stuck on how to do that, because I'm not sure if the page would be considered an article with no author and date, a website, or something else.

If anyone sees this, what do you think? I'm leaning toward citing it as an article with no author, but I have no idea what the in-text citation should be for a page like this. Google isn't much help, since I'm not sure how exactly to word my question.

Thanks.
 
isissxn said:
I need to cite this page - https://www.planetfitness.com/franchising/franchising-about-planet-fitness - as a source for a project, using the APA style. I'm a little stuck on how to do that, because I'm not sure if the page would be considered an article with no author and date, a website, or something else.

If anyone sees this, what do you think? I'm leaning toward citing it as an article with no author, but I have no idea what the in-text citation should be for a page like this. Google isn't much help, since I'm not sure how exactly to word my question.

Thanks.
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I'd say it's the online equivalent of a brochure. Does the APA have any guidelines for citing advertising and marketing materials?

I think of citations as being made up of two parts: What it is and where to find it. The APA guidelines for where to find it should be pretty consistent across all cases of citing things online. The guidelines for what it is probably stay pretty consistent across all cases of citing advertising copy and similar content.

I haven't looked at the APA guidelines since college, but if I had to do it now, that's the framework I'd use to find the right match for this scenario. Hope this helps, at least in some small way.
 
Hey, thanks for your answers! Elaedith, what you suggested would likely be acceptable. On theprestige's suggestion, I've looked to see if there are APA guidelines for citing marketing materials, brochures, etc. I found some for "pamphlets & brochures," so I'm going to see if that seems like a better fit. if not, I'll go with the simple website cite.

Thanks again! :)
 
TragicMonkey said:
Well, I feel old. My last research paper was written before websites were a thing.
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I remember my 9th grade teacher teaching us how to Google things. That was the first time I'd ever heard about Google, though I'm sure some members of the class were already aware of it.

I recall it taking less than a minute or two for someone to get in trouble for googling "boobs." Maybe slightly longer.
 
isissxn said:
I remember my 9th grade teacher teaching us how to Google things.
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I remember sending my first email as a freshman in college. "This will never catch on," I said. By my senior year they were putting naughty photos out there, which you could get to with Netscape Navigator. "Now this," I said, "this will prove popular."
 
isissxn said:
I remember my 9th grade teacher teaching us how to Google things. That was the first time I'd ever heard about Google, though I'm sure some members of the class were already aware of it.

I recall it taking less than a minute or two for someone to get in trouble for googling "boobs." Maybe slightly longer.
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I remember reading The Importance of Being Earnest with a class in the mid-1990s and telling them to do a search (I don't remember if it was Google) for Oscar Wilde and see what they could learn about him. Unfortunately, at the time there was a very popular (British, if I remember correctly) porn star called Wilde Oscar.
Nowadays, even if you google "Wilde Oscar", the first page will show only Oscar Wilde links.
 
Elaedith said:
I would cite it in text as Planet Fitness. (n.d.)

On reference list.
Planet Fitness. (n.d.). Planet Fitness History. Retrieved from https://www.planetfitness.com/franchising/franchising-about-planet-fitness

Disclaimer: I use APA, but usually never cite webpages.
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This is very similar to what we do, but we add two things:

1: The date the webpage was last updated - if it shows that. The webpage used in the OP as an example does not show that. Some do, some don't. I'm assuming the "(n.d.)" in Elaedith's example signifies "no date". (So really, we only add one thing compared to this example.)

2: Date accessed.

So like this:

Planet Fitness. (n.d.). Planet Fitness History. Retrieved from https://www.planetfitness.com/franchising/franchising-about-planet-fitness Accessed 01 May 2020

The "date accessed" thing lets you off the hook a bit if the website changes. It at least signifies that thing you cite was there at the time, in case someone tries some sort of "gotcha" thing when the site inevitably looks different later.

For our things we would print-to-pdf a copy of the webpage on the day we accessed it and put that copy in the administrative record. That's not perfect either, but it is something at least.
 
Babies, you're all babies. :p

First time I went online was when my son came home with the number for 'nocharge' dialup. He was about 7 or 8. It was a decent connection, actually.
 
isissxn said:
I remember my 9th grade teacher teaching us how to Google things. That was the first time I'd ever heard about Google, though I'm sure some members of the class were already aware of it.

I recall it taking less than a minute or two for someone to get in trouble for googling "boobs." Maybe slightly longer.
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I'm absolutely certain all of my ninth grade teachers were long dead before Google existed.

No, now that I think of it, I suppose some could have been born as late as the early 1930's. Could still be alive!
 
TragicMonkey said:
Well, I feel old. My last research paper was written before websites were a thing.
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Skeptic Ginger said:
First time I went online was when my son came home with the number for 'nocharge' dialup. He was about 7 or 8. It was a decent connection, actually.
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CORed said:
My last research paper was researched in the library and written on a Smith Corona portable typewriter. And the library had a card catalog, not a computer.
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I wrote my thesis on science fiction in 1992. My thesis supervisor insisted that I use this weird contraption that the Department of English at the University of Copenhagen had received as a gift from the American Embassy. He showed me how to use it by searching for the name of a popular science fiction writer, but the search results were not at all promising. It did help a little when it occurred to him that he had used the name David Niven instead of Larry Niven, but even after correcting his mistake, I got nothing I could use, so I spent the next months reading books instead. And I found another supervisor.
4-5 years later, the internet had improved considerably, but I still recommended that my students go to the library instead of relying on the internet, cf. Wilde Oscar.
 
dann said:
I wrote my thesis on science fiction in 1992. My thesis supervisor insisted that I use this weird contraption that the Department of English at the University of Copenhagen had received as a gift from the American Embassy. He showed me how to use it by searching for the name of a popular science fiction writer, but the search results were not at all promising. It did help a little when it occurred to him that he had used the name David Niven instead of Larry Niven, but even after correcting his mistake, I got nothing I could use, so I spent the next months reading books instead. And I found another supervisor.
4-5 years later, the internet had improved considerably, but I still recommended that my students go to the library instead of relying on the internet, cf. Wilde Oscar.
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Well, I think your are right that there is still value in doing research in a library. OTOH, A computer with word processing software beats the crap out of a typewriter for any kind of writing, from a few paragraphs to a book. Of course, a typewriter beats the crap out of writing it out longhand.
 
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CORed said:
Well, I think your are right that there is still value in doing research in a library. OTOH, A computer with word processing software beats the crap out of a typewriter for any kind of writing, from a few paragraphs to a book. Of course, a typewriter beats the crap out of writing it out longhand.
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And don't get me started on cuneiform on clay tablets. That method was just plain busted, I don't miss it at all.
 
TragicMonkey said:
And don't get me started on cuneiform on clay tablets. That method was just plain busted, I don't miss it at all.
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What do you need with a media that is fire resistant, flood resistant, EMP resistant, pest resistant, and stable over thousands of years? I'd like to see any modern media meeting up to those standards.
 
CORed said:
Well, it had the advantage of being highly durable storage medium, but correcting errors was a real pain.
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It could have benefited from error correcting codes. Works on any media. Math gets a little tedious though.
 
Planigale said:
What do you need with a media that is fire resistant, flood resistant, EMP resistant, pest resistant, and stable over thousands of years? I'd like to see any modern media meeting up to those standards.
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How much of what people have written is worth that level of preservation? The Rumpole stories and Mrs Undine's Living Room. That's it.
 
TragicMonkey said:
How much of what people have written is worth that level of preservation? The Rumpole stories and Mrs Undine's Living Room. That's it.
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You left out Bananarama's body of work! How can you consign them to damnatio memoriae?
 
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Skeptic Ginger said:
Babies, you're all babies. :p

First time I went online was when my son came home with the number for 'nocharge' dialup. He was about 7 or 8. It was a decent connection, actually.
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Babies huh? Try using a printing terminal with a 300 baud acoustic coupler. :p
 
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