MLA Referencing - In-Text Citations

Posted Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:14:59 -0000 by Krista

In-Text Citations for Dummies (Or those who've forgotten!)

When referencing a book in
particular, you will find that the MLA
style uses citations in the form of
paranthesis that look something like
this: For sometime now, Krista has
been caring for her Orchid. (Boniface
3). This encapsulates who wrote the
book (hypothetically) and what page
the referenced text is found on, this
case, the 3rd page.

Here is an example that OWL at

Purdue uses very nicely…

"Human beings have been described

as "symbol-using
animals" (Burke 3).

When a source has no known author, use a shortened title of the work
instead of an author name. Place the title in quotation marks if it's a
short work, or italicize or underline it if it's a longer work.

Your in-text citation will correspond with an entry in your Works Cited
page, which, for the Burke citation above, will look something like
this:

Burke, Kenneth. Language as

Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1966." (OWL 1)

Multiple Citations

When you have more than one reference you'd like to recognize from
one sentence of your own writing, you can include multiple writers
using a semi-colon between the two author references like.. (Burke 3;
Dewey 21) as OWL uses as an example.
Mutiple Books by Same Author

If in your writing, you have more than one book that is written by the
same author, your intext citations should be a bit different to
differentiate which sort the reference is from. An example of this would
be (Huxley, Brave New World Revisited 23) .

Journal Entries, Websites, Art, Articles

This is a very simple reference for these
sources. Just include their last name in
the brackets and you're done! So that
would look like this (Boniface).

Movies

For movie in-text citations, just state the

name of the movie and underline it.

"Sometimes we miss that touch so much

that we crash into each other just to feel
somethin" (Crash).

When Citations Aren't Needed

According to OWL,
"Common sense and ethics should determine your need for
documenting
sources. You do not need to give sources for familiar proverbs, well-
known
quotations or common knowledge. Remember, this is a rhetorical
choice,
based on audience. If you're writing for an expert audience of a
scholarly
journal, they'll have different expectations of what constitutes common
knowledge." (OWL).

References: Purdue OWL. "Purdue OWL. "MLA Formatting and

Style Guide." The Online Writing Lab at Purdue. 10 May 2008. Purdue
University Writing Lab. 16 June 2008,
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/, See MLA Works
Cited Reference at side for more details.

Flickr pictures: Book Cell and Book Pile.