ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Oxford Standard for Citation Of Legal Authorities

Okay kiddo, imagine you have to write an essay for your school on a topic like "Why we should save the environment". To make your essay more trustworthy, you need to include some facts and figures which prove your point. Now, where do you get these facts and figures from? Maybe from a book or an article about the environment, or from a website about conservation.

But wait! How do we know that these sources are reliable and correct? We need to give credit to the people who originally wrote the information, and we also need to make sure that we aren't accidentally copying someone else's words or ideas. This is where the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities comes in.

The Oxford Standard is basically a set of rules or guidelines that tell us how to give credit to our sources properly. It gives us a structure or format that we can use to cite our sources in a consistent and clear way.

So, let's take an example. You found a website called "Save the Earth - Top 10 Ways to Help the Planet". You read the article and it has some great tips on using less water, recycling more, and planting trees. Now, you want to use some of these ideas in your essay.

You would start by finding out who wrote the article and when it was published. Then, you would use the Oxford Standard to create a citation, which would look something like this:

"Smith, J. (2021) 'Save the Earth - Top 10 Ways to Help the Planet', [online] Available at: https://www.savetheearth.com/top10ways (Accessed: 25th May 2021)."

This citation includes the author's name, the date of publication, the title of the article, and the web address where you found it. By following the Oxford Standard, we can give credit to the author and source, and avoid plagiarism or accidentally copying someone else's work.

So, that's basically what the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities is, kiddo. It's a way to make sure we give proper credit to our sources, and it helps us be more trustworthy and professional in our writing.