Why go to a lecture?

A lot of important information is presented during lectures - information about your subject itself, information about the topic that you are studying, and often information about your assignments.

The relationship between your main study activities and your assessment tasks is something like this:

Assessment tasks	Study activities
Exams	>>	Lectures (backed up with reading)
Essays, Assignments	>>	Reading (backed up with lectures)

The lecture usually gives the lecturer his/her biggest audience. It makes sense that any hints relating to assessment, the structure of exams and so on, will be dropped during lectures. It is therefore not a good idea to miss them!

Lecture material and other spoken sources are not normally quoted in essays and assignments. As a rule you should only use written sources in your writing. This is mainly because written sources (but not spoken sources) can be verified.

So don't write in an essay: "As Dr. Smith explained in her lecture, ..."

Information presented during lectures is often considered to be 'given information' for the subject, and thus not necessary to cite (quote) anyway.

If your lecturer presents information from a piece of published writing that you want to include in one of your assignments, find the published source and cite that.