Personal communications, e.g. emails, messages from non-archived discussion groups or bulletin boards, text messages, online chats, memos, letters, personal interviews, telephone conversations, live speeches, and unrecorded classroom lectures, are not retrievable and therefore are not included in the reference list. They only appear in the text.
Do not include personal communications in your reference list.
Parenthetical citation: When you use another person’s ideas or words in your text, include the author’s name and publication date in brackets, generally at the end of the sentence, e.g. ... services closer to home (Bishop, 2024).
Narrative citation: If you use the author’s name as part of a sentence, include the date of publication in brackets, generally at the beginning of the sentence, e.g. Bishop (2024) argued that time was ...
In the body of your text, include the Initials and Surname of communicator and provide an exact date as possible.
Author (personal communication, Month Day, Year).
... in a recent e-mail conversation (A. D. Smith, personal communication, August 15, 2017).
In a lecture, K. Brown (personal communication, April 4, 2017) suggested that history ...