The Norton Introduction To Literature, Shorter 13E

34 QUOTATION, CITATION,
AND DOCUMENTATION
The bulk of any literat ure essay you write should consist of your own ideas expressed
in your own words. Yet you can develop your ideas and persuade readers to accept
them only if you present and analyze evidence. In literat ure essays, quotations are an
especially privileged kind of evidence, though paraphrase, summary, and description
also play key roles (see ch. 30 and 31.1.4). Likewise, a literat ure research essay, which
must make use of other primary and secondary sources, typically quotes selectively
from these as well (see 33.4.2). In all literature essays, then, your clarity, credibility,
and persuasiveness greatly depend on two t hings: (1) how responsibly, effectively, and
gracefully you present, differentiate, and move between others’ words and ideas and
your own; and (2) how careful you are to tell readers exactly where they can find each
quotation and each fact or idea that you paraphrase from a source. This chapter
addresses the question of how to quote, cite, and document sources of all kinds. (For
a discussion of when to do so, see 31.1.4 and 33.4.1.)
Rules for quoting, citing, and documenting sources can seem daunting and even,
at times, arcane or trivial. Why the heck should it m atter whether you put a word in
brackets or parentheses, or where in a sentence your parentheses appear? By demon-
strating mastery of such conventions, you assert your credibility as a member of the
scholarly community. But such conventions also serve an eminently practical pur-
pose: They provide a system for conveying a wealth of important information clearly,
concisely, and unobtrusively, with the least distraction to you and your reader.
As you probably know, there are many such systems. And different disciplines,
publications, and individual instructors prefer or require different ones. In Eng-
lish and other humanities disciplines, however, the preferred system is that devel-
oped by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and laid out in the MLA
Handbook (8th ed., 2016) and The MLA Style Center: Writing Resources from the
Modern Language Association (style.mla.org). All the rules presented in this chap-
ter accord with these two sources, which we encourage you to consult for more
extensive and detailed guidance than we can provide here.
34.1 THE RULES OF RESPONSIBLE QUOTING

When it comes to quoting, there are rules that you must follow in order to be respon-
sible both to your sources and to the integrity of your own prose. Additionally, there
are certain strategies that, though not required, w
ill help make your argument more
clear, engaging, and persuasive. The next section of this chapter (34.2) discusses
strategies; this one concentrates on the rules, starting with the cardinal principles
of responsible quotation before turning first to those rules specific to the genres of
prose, poetry, and drama and then to those rules that a ren’t genre specific.
1962
nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1962 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.1.2 Genre-Specific Rules 1963
34.1.1 Cardinal Principles

Three requirements so crucial to your credibility that you should regard them as
cardinal principles rather than simple rules are these:
1. A quotation means any two or more consecutive words or any one especially
distinctive word or label that appears in a source.
Representation as O’Brien practices In this sentence from The Undying

it in this book is not a mimetic act UNCERTAINTY OF THE NARRATOR IN
but a “game,” as Iser also calls it in a TIM O’BRIEN’S THE THINGS THEY
more recent essay, “The Play of the CARRIED, Steven Kaplan puts the word
Text,” a process of acting things game in quotation marks because it is a
out. . . . key concept defined in distinctive ways
in his source.
2. Except in the few cases and specific ways outlined in the rest of this section,
you must reproduce each quotation exactly as it appears in a source, includ-
ing every word and preserving original spelling, punctuation, capitaliza-
tion, italics, spacing, and so on.
INCORRECT VS. CORRECT

ORIGINAL SOURCE QUOTATION
[Mrs. PETERS sits down. The two Incorrect: A fter they discover the
women sit t here not looking at one dead bird and the men leave the room,
another, but as if peering into some- Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale simply “sit
thing and at the same time holding there not looking at each other,” com-
back. When they talk now it is in the pelled to speak but also “afraid of what
manner of feeling their way over they are saying.”
strange ground, as if afraid of what
Correct: A fter they discover the
they are saying, but as if they cannot
dead bird and the men leave the
help saying it.]
room, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale
simply “sit there not looking at one
another,” compelled to speak but also
“afraid of what they are saying.”
3. No change to a quotation, however much it accords with the rules outlined

below, is acceptable if it in any way distorts the original meaning of the
quoted passage.
34.1.2 Genre-Specific Rules

ecause prose, poetry, and drama each work somewhat differently, there are special
B
rules governing how to quote texts in each of these genres. This section spells out
the rules specific to prose (both fiction and nonfiction), poetry, and drama; the next
section covers rules applicable to all genres.
PROS E ( F I C T I O N O R N O N F I C T I O N )
• When a quotation from a single paragraph of a prose source takes up no
more than four lines of your essay, put it in quotation marks.

1964 CH. 34 | Quotation, Citation, and Documentation
Georgiana’s birthmark becomes “a frightful object” only b ecause “Aylmer’s som-

ber imagination” turns it into one, “selecting it as the symbol of his wife’s liability
to sin, sorrow, decay, and death.”
• When a prose quotation takes up more than four lines of your essay or
includes a paragraph break, indent it ½ inch from the left margin to
create a block quotation. Do not enclose the quotation in quotation marks,
since these are implied by the formatting. On the rare occasions you
quote more than one paragraph, reproduce any paragraph break that
occurs within the quotation by indenting the first line an additional ¼
inch.
Georgiana’s birthmark becomes “a frightful object” only b ecause “Aylmer’s som-
ber imagination” turns it into a “symbol” of
the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps
ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are tempo-
rary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.
The crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality
clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould. . . .
P O E T RY
• When quoting three or fewer lines of poetry, put the quotation in quota-
tion marks. Use a slash mark (/) with a space on either side to indicate any
line break that occurs in the quotation, and a double slash mark (//) to
indicate a stanza break.
Before Milton’s speaker can question his “Maker” for allowing him to go blind,
“Patience” intervenes “to prevent / That murmur.”
• When quoting more than three lines, indent the quotation ½ inch from the
left margin to create a block quotation. Do not enclose the quotation in quo-
tation marks, since these are implied by the formatting, but do reproduce
original line and stanza breaks and the spatial arrangement of the original
lines, including indentation.
Midway through the poem, the speaker suddenly shifts to second person, for the
first time addressing the drowned girl directly and almost affectionately as he
also begins to imagine her as a living person rather than a dead corpse:
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,

undernourished, and y our
tar-black face was beautiful.
• When a block quotation begins in the middle of a line of verse, indent the
partial line as much as necessary in order to approximate its original
positioning.
The speaker first demonstrates both his knowledge of persimmons and his
understanding of precision by telling us exactly what ripe fruits look and smell
like and then, step by careful step,

34.1.2 Genre-Specific Rules 1965
How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit
• If you omit one or more lines in the m
iddle of a block quotation, indicate
the omission with a line of spaced periods approximately the same length
as a complete line of the quoted poem.
About another image on the urn, the speaker has more questions than answers:
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
DR AMA
• With one exception (covered in the next rule), a quotation from a play is
governed by the same rules as outlined above u nder “Prose” if the quota-
tion is in prose, under “Poetry” if in verse.
• Regardless of its length, if a quotation from a play includes dialogue
between two or more characters, indent it ½ inch from the left margin to
create a block quotation. Begin each character’s speech with the character’s
name in capital letters followed by a period; indent the second and subse-
quent lines an additional ¼ inch. If a speech is in verse, you must also follow
the applicable rules outlined in the “Poetry” section above, by reproducing
original line breaks and so on (as in the second example below).
1. As soon as the men exit, the w omen start talking about the men and undoing
what the men just did:
MRS. HALE. I’d hate to have men coming into my kitchen, snooping around
and criticizing. [She arranges the pans under the sink which the L AWYER
had shoved out of place.]
MRS. PETERS. Of course it’s no more than their duty.
2. Antigone and Ismene’s initial exchange climaxes with Antigone declaring
her sister an “enemy,” even as Ismene declares herself one of Antigone’s lov-
ing “friends”:
ANTIGONE. If you w ill talk like this I w ill loathe you,
and you w ill be adjudged an e nemy—
justly—by the dead’s decision. Let me alone
and my folly with me, to endure this terror.
No suffering of mine w ill be enough
to make me die ignobly.
ISMENE. Well, if you w ill, go on.
Know this; that though you are wrong to go, your friends
are right to love you.

34.1.3 General Rules and Strategies

Unlike the rules covered in the last section, the ones laid out h
ere apply regardless
of whether you are quoting prose, poetry, or drama.
G R A M M A R , SY N TA X , T E N S E , A N D T H E U S E O F B R ACK E T S
• Quotations need not be complete sentences and may go anywhere in your
sentence.
1. The narrator says of Mr. Kapasi, “In his youth he’d been a devoted scholar of
foreign languages” who “dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and
dignitaries.”
2. “In his youth . . . a devoted scholar of foreign languages,” says the narrator, Mr.
Kapasi once “dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries.”
• Every sentence that includes a quotation and e very quotation you present
as if it is a sentence must—like every other sentence in your essay—
observe all the usual rules of grammar, syntax, and consistency of tense.
(In terms of these rules, words inside quotation marks don’t operate any
differently than do words outside of quotation marks.)
1. T
he w oman in all the portraits is Sentence 1 includes a quotation that is
idealized. “Not as she is, but as she treated as a sentence but isn’t one. Sen-
fills his dream.” tence 2 corrects that problem by using a
2. The w oman in all the portraits is colon to make the quoted fragment part
idealized: “Not as she is, but as she of the preceding sentence. Yet the frag-
fills his dream.” ment still contains a pronoun (his) that
3. The w oman in all the paintings is lacks any clear referent in the sentence,
idealized, portrayed by the artist making sentence 3 a better fix.
“[n]ot as she is, but as she fills his
dream.”
4. As Joy waits for Manley’s arrival, The fact that fiction typically uses past
“She looked up and down the empty tense, while we write about it in present
highway and had the furious feeling tense, often creates confusing tense
that she had been tricked, that he shifts like that in sentence 4. Usually,
had only meant to make her walk to partial paraphrase is a good solution: As
the gate after the idea of him” in sentence 5, quote only the most
rather than the reality. essential words from the passage,
remembering that what those words are
5. A
s Joy waits for Manley’s arrival,
w ill depend on the point you want to
she becomes “furious,” convinced
make.
that he has “tricked” her and only
“meant to make her walk to the
gate a fter the idea of him” rather
than the reality.
• When necessary to the grammar of your sentence or the intelligibility of

your quotation, you may add words to the quotation or make minor changes
to words within it, but you must enclose your additions or alterations in
brackets ([]) to let readers know that they are alterations. (In sentence 3
above, for example, the first letter of the word not appears in brackets
because a capital N has been changed to a lowercase n.)

34.1.3 General Rules and Strategies 1967
1. A
s Joy waits for Manley’s arrival, This sentence demonstrates how chang-
“She look[s] up and down the ing verb endings and putting the new
empty highway and ha[s] the furi- ones in brackets can solve tense shift
ous feeling that she ha[s] been problems of the kind found in exam-
tricked, that he had only meant to ple 4 above.
make her walk to the gate a fter the
idea of him.”
2. T
he w
oman in all the portraits is If a pronoun reference in a quotation is
idealized, represented “[n]ot as she unclear, one solution is to put the noun
is, but as she fills his [the painter’s] to which the pronoun refers in brackets
dream.” after the pronoun, as in this sentence.
For an alternative fix, see example 3
above.
3. A s Mays explains, a writer “can In this sentence, the phrase “these

assume that their reader w ill rec- s ymbols” refers to something outside
ognize the traditional meanings of the quoted sentence. The added
these [“traditional”] symbols,” but and thus bracketed word traditional
“invented symbols” work appears in quotation marks b ecause it,
differently. too, comes directly from the same
source.
TIP: Though such alterations are permissible, they are often so much less effective
than other techniques that some of them (including changes to verb endings) are not
actually mentioned in the MLA Handbook. Used too often, this technique can become
distracting and put you at risk of appearing as if y ou’re “fiddling” with sources. As a
result, look for other fixes whenever possible.
O M I S S I O N S A N D E L L I PS E S
• A quotation that is obviously a sentence fragment need not be preceded or
followed by an ellipsis (. . .). But you must use an ellipsis whenever
—your quotation appears to be a complete sentence but actually isn’t one in
the source (as in the first sentence in the example below),
—you omit words from the middle of a quoted sentence (as in the second
sentence in the example below), or
—you omit one or more sentences between quoted sentences (as between
the second and third sentences in the example below).
When the ellipsis coincides with the end of your sentence, add a period
followed by an ellipsis (as in the first sentence below).
The narrator says of Mr. Kapasi,
In his youth he’d been a devoted scholar of foreign languages. . . . He had
dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, . . . settling dis-
putes of which he alone could understand both sides. . . . Now only a handful of
European phrases remained in his memory, scattered words for t hings like sau-
cers and chairs. . . .
Tip: If you omit the end of a sentence and one or more of the sentences that immedi-
ately follow it, the four dots are sufficient; you do not need two ellipses.
• If the quoted source uses an ellipsis, put your ellipsis in brackets to distin-
guish between the two. [NOTE: Throughout this book, we have instead
put every added ellipsis in brackets.]

As an excited Ruth explains, the The first (unbracketed) ellipsis here

prospect of receiving a check is “a occurs in the original source; the sec-
whole lot different from having it ond (bracketed) ellipsis d
oesn’t.
come and being able to hold it in
your hands . . . a piece of paper
worth ten thousand dollars.” “[. . .]
I wish Walter Lee was h ere!,” she
exclaims.
OT H E R ACCE P TA B L E CH A N G E S TO Q U OTAT I O N S:
SI C A N D E M PHASI S AD D E D
• If a quotation includes what is or might seem to your reader an error of fact
or of grammar, spelling, and so on, you may signal to the reader that you
haven’t introduced the error yourself by putting the word sic (Latin for “thus”
or “so”) next to the error. Put parentheses around sic if it comes after the
quotation (as in the first example below), brackets if it appears within the
quotation (as in the second example). Do not use sic if context makes it obvi-
ous that the error isn’t yours or isn’t truly an error, as in the case of texts
featuring archaic spelling, dialect, and so on.
1. S
haw admitted, “Nothing can In sentence 1 (from the MLA
extinguish my interest in Shake- Handbook) parentheses work b ecause
spear” (sic). nothing has been added into the
quotation; the second, slightly m odified
2. I n the preface to Shakes Versus
sentence requires brackets. E ither way,
Shav: A Puppet Play (1949), Shaw
the word sic appears next to the mis-
avows, “Nothing can extinguish
spelled word and is not italicized.
my interest in Shakespear [sic]. It
began when I was a small boy. . . .”
3. Charley gets to the heart of the Sic would be inappropriate h ere,

matter when he asks Willy, since it’s clear this quotation accurately
“when’re you gonna realize that reproduces the character’s speech
them t hings don’t mean patterns.
anything?”
4. The Misfit firmly rejects the idea In this case, though use of the word hep
that he should pray, insisting, “I (for help) is entirely characteristic of the
don’t want no hep” (sic), “I’m d
oing character’s speech, it could so easily
all right by myself.” look like a typo that the word sic seems
helpful.
• On the rare occasions when you need to emphasize a specific word or phrase
within a quotation, you may put it in italics and indicate this change by put-
ting the words emphasis added in parentheses a fter the quotation, ideally at
the end of the clause or sentence.
Avowing that men “must help them [women] to stay in that beautiful world of their
own, lest ours get worse” (emphasis added), Marlow acknowledges that men have a
selfish interest in preserving w
omen’s innocence and idealism.

34.1.3 General Rules and Strategies 1969
PU N C T UAT I N G Q U OTAT I O N S
• Though you must always reproduce original punctuation within a quota-
tion, you may end it with whatever punctuation your sentence requires,
and this is one change you do not need to indicate with brackets.
1. W
hether portrayed as “queen,” In the poem quoted here, no commas
“saint,” or “angel,” the same appear after the words queen and angel,
“nameless girl” appears in “all his but the syntax of the sentence requires
canvases.” that they be added. Similarly, the
comma that appears a fter the word
canvases in the poem is here replaced by
a period.
2. The narrator tells us that Mr. Kapasi’s ere, a comma replaces the original
H
“job was a sign of his failings,” for period a fter failings, and a period
“[i]n his youth he’d been a devoted replaces the original comma after
scholar of foreign languages” who dignitaries.
“dreamed of being an interpreter for
diplomats and dignitaries.”
• Commas and periods belong inside the closing quotation mark (as in the
above examples). All other punctuation marks belong outside the closing
quotation mark if they are your additions (as in the first and second exam-
ples below), inside if they are not (as in the third example below).
1. Wordsworth calls nature a “homely Nurse”; she has “something of a Mother’s mind.”
2. What exactly does Lili mean when she tells Guy, “You are h ere to protect me if
anything happens”?
3. Bobby Lee speaks volumes about the grandmother when he says, “She was
a talker, w
asn’t she?”
• When your indented block quotation includes a quotation, put the latter in
double quotation marks (“ ”).
Written just four years a fter A Raisin in the Sun’s debut, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” stresses the urgency of the situation of African
Americans like the Youngers by comparing it to those of Africans like Joseph
Asagai:
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given
rights. The nations of . . . Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining
political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gain-
ing a cup of coffee at a lunch c ounter. Perhaps it is easy for t hose who have never
felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”
• When a shorter (non-block) quotation includes a quotation, put the latter
in single quotation marks (‘ ’).
1. As Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted in 1963, “it is easy for t hose who have
never felt the stinging darts of segregation” or the “degenerating sense of
‘nobodiness’ ” it instills, “to say, ‘Wait,’ ” be patient, your time w ill come.
2. In a poem less about Hard Rock himself than about the way he is perceived by
his fellow inmates, it makes sense that many words and lines take the form
of unattributed quotations, as in the unforgettable opening, “Hard Rock was
‘known not to take no shit / From nobody.’ ”

• When your quotation consists entirely of words that appear within quota-
tion marks in the source, use double quotation marks, while introducing
the quotation in a way that makes the special status of these words and
their provenance clear.
1. “[K]nown not to take no shit / From nobody,” as his fellow inmates put it, Hard
Rock initially appears almost superhuman.
2. The Misfit’s response is as shocking as it is simple: “I don’t want no hep,” “I’m
doing all right by myself.”
3. In an introductory note quoted by Alvarez, Plath describes the poem’s speaker
as “a girl with an Electra complex” whose “father died while she thought he
was God.”
34.2 STR ATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE QUOTING

• Though it is not a rule that all of your quotations must appear inside one of
your sentences, your clarity w ill be greatly enhanced if you treat it like one,
making the connection between quotation and inference as seamless as
possible.
1. S mith is highly critical of O’Brien’s

portrayal of Martha. “Like other
women in the book, she represents
all those back home who w ill never
understand the warrior’s trauma.”
2. Smith is highly critical of O’Brien’s Example 1 includes a quotation that isn’t
portrayal of Martha: “Like other part of any sentence. Example 2 corrects
women in the book, she represents that problem with a colon, but the reader
all t hose back home who w ill never still has to pause to figure out that it’s
understand the warrior’s trauma.” Smith who’s being quoted here and that
the quotation refers to Martha. Sentence 3
3. Smith is highly critical of O’Brien’s
thus offers a better solution.
portrayal of Martha, claiming that,
“[l]ike other w
omen in the book,”
Martha “represents all those back
home who w ill never understand the
warrior’s trauma.”
• Avoid drawing attention to your evidence as evidence with “filler” phrases

such as This statement is proof that . . . ; This phrase is significant because . . . ;
This idea is illustrated by . . . ; T
here is good evidence for this. . . . Show why
facts are meaningful or interesting rather than first or only saying that they
are.
INE FFECT IVE QUOTATION EFFECTIVE QUOTATION
Wordsworth calls nature a “homely Personifying nature as a “homely Nurse”

Nurse” and says that she has “some- with “something of a M
other’s mind,”
thing of a Mother’s mind.” This Wordsworth depicts nature as healing
d iction supports the idea that he sees and nurturing the humans it also
nature as a healing, maternal force. He resembles.
is saying that nature heals and cares
OR
for us.

34.2 Strategies for Effective Quoting 1971
A “homely Nurse” with “something of a

Mother’s mind,” nature, implies Words
worth, both heals and nurtures the
humans it also resembles.
Tennyson advocates decisive Tennyson advocates forceful action,

action, even as he highlights the forces encouraging his contemporaries “To
that often prohibited his contempo- strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
raries from taking it. This is suggested Yet he recognizes that his generation is
by the lines “Made weak by time and more tempted to “yield” than earlier ones
fate, but strong in w
ill, / To strive, to because they have been “Made weak by
seek, to find, and not to yield.” time and fate.”
• On the one hand, make sure that you provide readers the information they
need to understand a quotation and to appreciate its relevance to your
argument. Quite often, contextual information—for instance, about who’s
speaking to whom and in what situation—is crucial to a quotation’s mean-
ing. On the other hand, keep such contextual information to a minimum
and put the emphasis on the words that really m
atter and on your infer-
ences about why and how they matter.
1. S
trong as Mama is, she and Walter
share a similar, traditional vision of
gender roles: “I’m telling you to be
the head of this family . . . like you
supposed to be”; “the colored
woman” should be “building their
men up and making ’em feel like
they somebody.”
2. Strong as Mama is, she shares Wal- Example 2 is more effective because it
ter’s traditional vision of gender roles. offers crucial information about who is
When she urges him “to be the head speaking to whom (“When she urges him,”
of this f amily from now on like you “Walter elsewhere says”) and includes
supposed to be,” she affirms that her inferences (“she affirms that her son is the
son is the family’s rightful leader— family’s rightful leader . . .”; “Implicitly,
not her d aughter, not her she’s also doing”). Purely contextual infor-
daughter-in-law, not even herself, mation is, however, stated briefly and
despite her seniority. Implicitly, she’s early, in subordinate clauses.
also d
oing what Walter elsewhere
says “the colored w oman” should
do—“building their men up and
making ’em feel like they somebody.”
3. Julian expresses disgust for the

class distinctions so precious to his
mother: “Rolling his eyes upward, he
put his tie back on. ‘Restored to my
class,’ he muttered.”
4. Julian professes disgust for the class Again, example 4 improves on exam-
distinctions so precious to his ple 3 by providing missing information
mother. At her request, he puts back (“At her request”), yet paraphrasing and
on his tie, but he can’t do so without subordinating what is only information
“[r]olling his eyes” and making fun (“he puts back on his tie”).
(at least under his breath) of the idea
that he is thereby “[r]estored to [his]
class.”

• Lead your readers into long, especially block quotations with a clear sense
of just what in the quotation they should be paying attention to and why.
Follow it up with at least a sentence or more of analysis/inferences, per-
haps repeating especially key words and phrases from the long quotation.
Whereas the second stanza individualizes the dead martyrs, the third considers
the characteristics they shared with each other and with all those who dedicate
themselves utterly to any one cause:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
Whereas all other “living” p eople and things are caught up in the “stream” of
change represented by the shift of seasons, those who fill their “[h]earts with one
purpose alone” become as hard, unchanging, and immovable as stone.
• Though long, especially block quotations can be effective, they should be
used sparingly and strategically. All too easily, they can create information
overload for readers, making it hard to see what is most significant and why.
When you quote only individual words or short phrases, weaving them into
your sentences in the ways demonstrated earlier in this section, you and
your readers can more easily stay focused on what’s significant and on why
and how it is.
• Vary the length of quotations and the way you pres ent them. It can be very
tempting to fall into a pattern—always, for example, choosing quotations
that are at least a sentence long and attaching them to your sentence with a
colon. But overusing any one technique can easily render your essay monot-
onous and might even prompt readers to focus more on the (repetitive) way
you present evidence than on the evidence and argument themselves. To
demonstrate, h ere are two sets of sentences that present the same material in
varying ways.
1. According to Wordsworth, nature is a “homely Nurse” with “something of a
Mother’s mind”; it heals and nurtures the h
umans it also resembles.
2. A “homely Nurse” with “something of a M other’s mind,” nature, suggests
Wordsworth, both heals and nurtures the h
umans it also resembles.
3. Personifying nature as a “homely Nurse” with “something of a Mother’s
mind,” Wordsworth depicts nature as healing and nurturing the humans it
also resembles.
4. Healing and nurturing the humans it also resembles, Wordsworth’s nature is
a “homely Nurse” with “something of a Mother’s mind.”
1. Howe insists that the poem’s “personal-confessional element . . . is simply too
obtrusive,” “strident and undisciplined,” to allow a reader to interpret “Daddy”
“as a dramatic presentation, a monologue spoken by a disturbed girl not nec-
essarily to be identified with Sylvia Plath,” especially given the resemblances
between “events” described in the poem and those that actually occurred in
Plath’s life.
2. “Daddy,” argues Howe, cannot be read “as a dramatic presentation, a mono-
logue spoken by a disturbed girl not necessarily to be identified with Sylvia
Plath”; its “personal-confessional element . . . is simply too obtrusive,” too

34.3 Citation and Documentation 1973
“strident and undisciplined,” he reasons, while the “events of the poem” too
closely correspond to “the events of her life.”
34.3 CITATION AND DOCUMENTATION

In addition to indicating which words, facts, and ideas in your essay derive from
sources, you need to let your readers know where each can be found. You want to
enable readers not only to “check up” on you but also to follow in your footsteps and
build on your work. A fter all, you hope that your analysis of a text w ill entice read-
ers to re-read certain passages from the text in a different way or to consult other
sources that you’ve made sound interesti ng. This is another way your essay con-
tributes to keeping the conversation about literature g oing. And this is where cita-
tion and documentation come into play.
In the MLA system, parenthetical citations embedded in your essay are keyed
to an alphabetized list of works cited that follows your essay. By virtue of both their
content and placement, parenthetical citations help you to quickly, unobtrusively
indicate what you have derived from which source and where in that source your
readers can find that material. The list of works cited communicates the informa-
tion about the source that your readers need both to find it themselves and, in the
meantime, to begin evaluating its relevance, credibility, currency, and so on without
having to find it.
To demonstrate how this works, here is a typical sentence with parenthetical
citation, followed by the coordinating works-cited e ntry:
In-Text Citation
In one critic’s view, “Ode on a Gre- Placed at the end of the sentence
cian Urn” explores “what g reat art and beginning with the word
means” not to the ordinary person, Bowra (sans quotation marks or
but “to t hose who create it” (Bowra italics) and the number 148, this
148). parenthetical citation tells us that
the last name of the “critic” the sen-
tence mentions and quotes is Bowra,
that the source of the quotations is
something he authored, and that the
quotations come from page 148 of
that source. To find out more, we
have to turn to the list of works
cited and look for an entry, like the
following, that begins with the name
Bowra.
Works-Cited Entry
Bowra, C. M. The Romantic This coordinating works-cited entry

Imagination. Oxford UP, gives us Bowra’s complete name as it
1950. appears in the source and indicates the
source’s title, publisher, and date of
publication. By its format, the entry also
tells us that the source is a printed
book.
That our explanations of this sample parenthetical citation and works-cited entry
take up much more space than the citation and entry themselves demonstrates the

value of the MLA system. This example also demonstrates the importance of the
placement and content of each citation and entry: Where the parenthetical citation
falls in a sentence is key to clearly indicating what is being “sourced”; what the par-
enthetical citation and works-cited entry include and in what order are all key to
ensuring that the citation leads us seamlessly to one source in the works cited and
tells us where precisely to look in that source.
The exact content and placement of each parenthetical citation and works-cited
entry will thus depend on a host of factors. The next sections explain how this works.
34.3.1 Parenthetical Citation

T H E S TA N DA R D PA R E N T H E T I C A L CI TAT I O N :
CO N T E N T A N D PL ACE M E N T
Because lists of works cited are organized primarily by author or creator, the stan-
dard MLA parenthetical citation looks like, and appears in the same place as, the
ones in the sample sentences above and below. It includes an author or creator’s
name and a page number or numbers with nothing but a space in between. (Do not
write page or p., for example, or insert a comma.) The citation comes at the end of a
sentence—inside the period (because it is part of the sentence in which you bor-
row from a source) and outside any quotation marks within the sentence (since it is
not part of an a ctual quotation; it is not in the source but provides information
about the source). In keeping with the rules for punctuating quotations laid out ear-
lier in this chapter (34.1.3), you omit any final punctuation mark within your quota-
tion, as in the second example below.
1. Most domestic poems of the 1950s foreground the parent-child relationship
(Axelrod 1093).
2. As a character in one of the most famous works of Southern fiction memorably
declares of the South, “I dont [sic] hate it” (Faulkner 378).
When citing a work from an anthology, refer to the author of the work, not the
anthology editor, and create a corresponding entry in your list of works cited. Below is
an example of this kind of citation, followed by the corresponding works-cited entry.
In-Text Citation
By the end of an initiation story, its protagonist may well have to confront “how
hard the world” usually is (Updike 167).
Works-Cited Entry
Updike, John. “A & P.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J.
Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W. Norton, 2019, pp. 163-67.
The next two sections detail the variations on the standard MLA parenthetical
citation format, starting with variations in where the citation goes before turning
to variations in what it includes.
VA R IAT I O N S I N PL ACE M E N T
• In the case of a block quotation, the parenthetical citation should imme-
diately follow (not precede) the punctuation mark that ends the quotation.

34.3.1 Parenthetical Citation 1975
According to the narrator,

The job was a sign of his failings. In his youth he’d been a devoted scholar of
foreign languages, the owner of an impressive collection of dictionaries. He
had dreamed of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, resolving
conflicts between p eople and nations, settling disputes of which he alone
could understand both sides. (Lahiri 451)
• If a sentence either incorporates material from multiple sources (as in the

first example below) or refers both to something from a source and to your
own idea (as in the second example), put the appropriate parenthetical
citation in midsentence next to the material to which it refers. Ideally, you
should insert the citation before a comma or semicolon, since it w
ill be less
obtrusive that way. But your first priority should be clarity about which
material comes from which source (see the third example below).
1. Critics describe Caliban as a creature with an essentially “unalterable natur[e]”
(Garner 458), “incapable of comprehending the good or of learning from the past”
(Peterson 442), “impervious to genuine moral improvement” (Wright 451).
2. If Caliban is truly “incapable of . . . learning from the past” (Peterson 442), then
how do we explain the changed attitude he seems to demonstrate at the
play’s end?
3. Tanner (7) and Smith (viii) have looked at works from a cultural perspective.
• If, in a single paragraph, you make several uninterrupted references to the

same source and especially to the same passage in a source, you may save
the parenthetical citation u
ntil a fter the last such reference, as in the follow-
ing sentences from Susan Farrell’s Tim O’Brien and Gender: A Defense
of The Things They Carried.
Smith connects a 1980s backlash against the feminist movement to the mis
ogyny she reads in Vietnam War literat ure, a misogyny which she describes as
“very visible,” as seemingly “natural and expected.” In popular representations, Smith
argues, the “Vietnam War is being reconstructed as a site where white American
manhood—figuratively as well as literally wounded during the war and assaulted
by the w omen’s movement for twenty years—can reassert its dominance in the
social hierarchy” (“Back” 115).
VA R IAT I O N S I N CO N T E N T: I D E N T I F YI N G T H E SO U RCE
The standard MLA parenthetical citation may contain the author’s name and the
relevant page number(s). But variations are the rule when it comes to content. In
this section, we deal with variations in how a citation indicates which source you
refer to; the next section instead covers variations in how you indicate where in the
source borrowed material can be found.
Your parenthetical citation should include something besides or in addition to
one author or creator’s name whenever you do the following:
• Name the author(s) or creator(s) in your text.
Parenthetical citations should include only information that isn’t crucial to the
intelligibility and credibility of your argument. Yet in nine cases out of ten,
information about whose ideas, data, or words you cite is crucial. As a result, you
should try whenever possible to indicate this in your text, usually via a signal

phrase (as described in 33.4.2). When you do so, your parenthetical citation
usually need only include location information such as page number(s).
1. In Maurice Bowra’s view, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” explores “what g reat art
means” not to the ordinary person but “to t hose who create it” (148).
2. As Faulkner’s Quentin Compson memorably declares of the South, “I dont [sic]
hate it” (378).
In lit
er
a
ture essays, parenthetical citations containing the name of the author
whose work you are analyzing should be relatively rare. (Notice that there are none,
for example, in any of the critical excerpts on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
found in ch. 10.)
• Cite a source with multiple authors or creators.
If the source has two authors or creators, and they are not named in your text,
the parenthetical citation should include both last names (as in the example
below). If the source has three or more authors or creators, include the first
author’s name followed by the words et al. (abbreviated Latin for “and others”).
Surprisingly, “it seems not to have been primarily the coarseness and sexuality of
Jane Eyre which shocked Victorian reviewers” so much as its “rebellious femi-
nism” (Gilbert and Gubar 338).
• Cite multiple works by the same author/creator or an anonymous work.
In either of t hese cases, you w
ill need to indicate the title of your source. If pos
sible, do so in your text, putting only location information in the parenthetical
citation (as in the first example below). Otherwise, your parenthetical citation
must include a shortened version of the title (as in the second example below). If
your parenthetical citation also needs to include the author or creator’s name(s),
this comes first, followed by a comma, the shortened title, and the location
information (as in the third example below).
1. Like Joy in O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the protagonist of her story
“Everything That Rises Must Converge” takes enormous pride in his intellect,
even believing himself “too intelligent to be a success” (500).
2. Many of O’Connor’s most faulty characters put enormous stock in their intel-
lects, one even secretly believing himself “too intelligent to be a success”
(“Everything” 500).
3. Intellectuals fare poorly in much Southern fiction. When we learn that the pro-
tagonist of one short story secretly believes himself “too intelligent to be a suc-
cess,” we can be pretty sure that he’s in for a fall (O’Connor, “Everything” 500).
Be sure to format shortened titles just as you do full titles, either putting
them in quotation marks or italicizing them, as appropriate (see 32.5).
• Cite multiple authors or creators with the same last name.
In this case, you should ideally indicate the author or creator’s full name in the
text so that your parenthetical citation need only include location information.
Otherw ise, the parenthetical citation should begin with the author or creator’s
first initial followed by a period, followed by his or her last name and the loca-
tion information (as in the first example below). If your authors or creators
share the same first initial, however, you w
ill need to include a first name instead
(as in the second example).

1. As one of Joyce’s fellow writers points out, “To be absolutely faithful

to what one sees and hears and not to speculate on what may lie b ehind
it . . . i s a creed that produces obvious limitations” (F. O’Connor 188).
2. As one of Flannery O’Connor’s fellow short-story writers points out, “To be
absolutely faithful to what one sees and hears and not to speculate on what
may lie b ehind it . . . is a creed that produces obvious limitations” (Frank
O’Connor 188).
• Cite multiple authors or creators simultaneously.
In this case, include all the citations within a single set of parentheses,
separating them with semicolons.
Many scholars attribute Caliban’s bestiality to a seemingly innate inability to
learn or change (Garner 438; Peterson 442; Wright 451).
• Quote a source quoted in another source.
You should quote from an original source whenever possible. But on the rare
occasions when you quote something quoted in another source, indicate the orig-
inal source in your text. Then start your parenthetical citation with the abbrevia-
tion qtd. in followed by the name of the secondhand source’s author and the
location information.
In an introductory note to “Daddy” that Plath wrote for a radio program, she
describes the poem’s speaker as “a girl with an Electra complex” (qtd. in Alva-
rez 1080).
VA R IAT I O N S I N CO N T E N T: I N D I C AT I N G A LO C AT I O N
WI T H I N T H E SO U RCE
Though page numbers are the usual means by which we indicate where in a source
a reader can find the ideas, information, or words we cite, there are exceptions.
Indeed, exceptions are unusually frequent in literature essays. The most important
reason for this is that literary texts tend to be available in different editions, so it’s
helpful to give readers the information they need to locate material in the text
regardless of the edition they use.
When it comes to the question of how to do so, there is some ambiguity and
wiggle room in the MLA guidelines. Thus, as we explain below, different instructors
may interpret some of these guidelines differently or simply prefer that you use one
method rather than another.
Your parenthetical citation w ill generally need to include location informa-
tion other than, or in addition to, a page number whenever you cite any of the
following:
• Poetry
When citing poetry, it is customary to refer to line (not page) number(s)
and to indicate that you are d oing so by including the word line or lines, as
appropriate, in your first such parenthetical citation. Though MLA guide-
lines stipulate that later parenthetical citations include only the line num-
ber (as in the example below), some instructors prefer that the word line
or lines appear in e very poem-related parenthetical citation. And this prac-
tice can be especially helpful when your sources include prose, as well as
poetry.

In a poem less about Hard Rock himself than about the way he is perceived by his
fellow inmates, it makes sense that many words and lines take the form of unat-
tributed quotations, as in the unforgettable opening, “Hard Rock was ‘known not
to take no shit / From nobody’ ” (lines 1-2), or “Yeah, remember when he / Smacked
the captain with his dinner tray?” (17-18).
• Play with more than one act or scene

At least when it comes to canonical plays, MLA guidelines call for omitting page
numbers and referring only to act, scene, and line numbers, as appropriate,
always using arabic numerals (1, 2, etc.), and separating each with a period (as in
the first example below). Some instructors, however, prefer that you use roman
numerals (I, II, i, ii, etc.) for acts and scenes (as in the second example below).
1. “I know not ‘seems,’ ” Hamlet famously declares (1.2.76).
2. “I know not ‘seems,’ ” Hamlet famously declares (I.ii.76).
• Commonly studied work of fiction or nonfiction prose

Parenthetical citations of this kind should always include page numbers unless
your instructor indicates otherwise. But you may also need to include addi-
tional location information. If so, the page number comes first, followed by a
semicolon and the other information. Use common abbreviations to indicate
what this information is (e.g., vol. for volume, bk. for book, sec. for section), and
use arabic numerals (1, 2, e tc.), even if the text uses roman numerals (I, II, etc.).
(The second example below is quoted directly from the MLA Handbook.)
1. “I learned,” explains Frankenstein’s creature, “that the possessions most
esteemed by your fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied descent united
with riches” (96; vol. 2, ch. 5).
2. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft recollects many
“women who, not led by degrees to proper studies, and not permitted to choose
for themselves, have indeed been overgrown c hildren” (185; ch. 13, sec. 2).
• Works in which paragraphs are numbered

When you cite prose works from an anthology like this one, in which para-
graphs are numbered, your instructor may prefer that you cite paragraph num-
bers, using the appropriate abbreviation (par.). If you include both page and
paragraph number, insert a semicolon a fter the page number (as in the first
example below). If your parenthetical citations include only paragraph numbers,
your instructor may allow you to omit the abbreviation par. from the second and
subsequent such citations (as in the second example).
1. When they meet years later in the supermarket, Roberta’s “lovely and sum-
mery and rich” appearance leaves the narrator not only “dying to know” how
this transformation came about but also resentful of Roberta and p eople like
her: “Everything is so easy for them,” she thinks (237; par. 68).
2. Though “dying to know” just how Roberta came to be so “lovely and sum-
mery and rich” since they last met (par. 68), all the narrator initially asks is,
“How long have you been h ere?” (69).
• Multiple volumes of a multivolume work

If you cite material from more than one volume of a multivolume work, your
parenthetical citation must indicate both volume and page numbers. Put the
volume number first, followed by a colon, a space, and the page number(s).
Though page numbers should take the same form they do in the source (e.g.,

11 or xi), volume numbers should always be in Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3). (The
following example comes from the MLA Handbook.)
As Wellek admits in the middle of his multivolume history of modern literary criti-
cism, “An evolutionary history of criticism must fail. I have come to this resigned
conclusion” (5: xxii).
If you cite material from only one volume of a multivolume work, omit the
volume number from your parenthetical citations, since it w ill be included in
your works-cited entry.
• Sacred text
When citing sacred texts such as the Bible or the Quran, indicate e ither in
your text or in your parenthetical citation the title, editor, or translator of the
edition you’re using on the first occasion you cite it. Then include in your
parenthetical citation(s) the book, chapter, and verse (or their equivalent),
separated by periods, u nless you have indicated these in your text. (Either
way, do not include page numbers.) Abbreviate the names of the books of the
Bible, but don’t put these abbreviations in quotation marks or italicize them.
(The second example below is quoted directly from the MLA Handbook.)
1. The New English Bible version of the verse reads, “In the beginning of cre-
ation, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and
void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept
over the surface of the waters” (Gen. 1.1-2).
2. In one of the most vivid prophetic visions in the Bible, Ezekiel saw “what
seemed to be four living creatures,” each with the faces of a man, a lion, an ox,
and an eagle (New Jerusalem Bible, Ezek. 1.5-10). John of Patmos echoes this
passage when describing his vision (Rev. 4.6-8).
• An entire source, a source without pagination or numbered pages, or a source
that is only one page long
When you refer in a blanket way to an entire source rather than to something
particular in it or to a source that lacks numbered pages, your parenthetical
citation w ill include no page numbers. The same is true of one-page sources,
since your works-cited entry will include the page number. If you clearly iden-
tify such sources in your text, you won’t need a parenthetical citation at all (as
in the first example below). Otherwise, your citation w ill include only author
or creator’s name(s) and/or a shortened title (as in the second example).
1. Many critics, including Maurice Bowra, see Creon as morally inferior to
Antigone.
2. Where some critics see the play as siding unequivocally with Antigone (Bowra),
others see it as more ambivalent and/or ambiguous on this score (Nussbaum).
However, if a source lacking numbered pages has other numbered divisions
such as sections or paragraphs, your parenthetical citation w ill need to include
these: Use Arabic numerals (e.g., 1, 2, 3), regardless of what kind the source
uses, and introduce them with the appropriate abbreviation (e.g., sec. or secs.,
par. or pars., ch. or chs.). If your parenthetical citation also includes author
name(s) and/or short title, use a comma to separate these from your location
information, as in the following example from the MLA Handbook:
here is little evidence here for the claim that “Eagleton has belittled the gains of
T
postmodernism” (Chan, par. 41).

OT H E R VA R IAT I O N S I N CO N T E N T: SI C A N D E M PHASI S AD D E D
When a parenthetical citation intervenes between the end of a quotation that you need
to follow up with the words sic or emphasis added (for the reasons outlined in 34.1.3),
it’s usually advisable to put sic in brackets within the quotation, next to the error to
which it applies (as in the first example below), but to put emphasis added at the end of
the parenthetical citation, preceding it with a semicolon (as in the second example).
1. Shaw admitted, “Nothing can extinguish my interest in Shakespear [sic]” (1).
2. Avowing that men “must help them [women] to stay in that beautiful world
of their own, lest ours get worse” (1196; emphasis added), Marlow acknowledges
that men have a selfish interest in preserving women’s innocence and idealism.
34.3.2 The List of Works Cited

Your list of works cited must include all, and only, the sources that you cite in your
essay, providing full publication information about each. This section explains both
how to format and organize the list and how to assemble each entry in it.
F O R M AT T I N G T H E L I S T
Your list of works cited should begin on a separate page a fter the conclusion of
your essay. Center the heading Works Cited (without quotation marks or italics) at
the top of the first page, and double-space throughout.
The first line of each entry should begin at the left margin; the second and
subsequent lines should be indented ½ inch.
Your list should be alphabetized, ignoring articles (such as A, An, The) in titles.
If your list includes multiple works by the same author, begin the first entry with
the author’s name, and each subsequent entry with three hyphens followed by a
period. Alphabetize these entries by title, again ignoring articles (A, An, The).
WOR K S CI T E D
Canby, Vincent. “Film: ‘Smooth Talk,’ from Joyce Carol Oates Tale.” The New York Times,
28 Feb. 1986, www.nytimes.com/1986/02/28/movies/fi lm-smooth-talk-from-joyce-carol
-oates-tale.html.
Daly, Brenda O. “An Unfilmable Conclusion: Joyce Carol Oates at the Movies.” The Journal
of Popular Culture, vol. 23, no. 3, Winter 1989, pp. 101-14. Periodicals Archive Online,
ezproxy.l ibrary.u nlv.edu/login?u rl=http://search.proquest.com /docview/1297343870
?accountid=3611.
Dylan, Bob. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” 1965. Bob Dylan, Sony Music Entertainment,
bobdylan.com/songs/its-a ll-over-now-baby-blue/.
Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “Smoothing Out the Rough Spots: The Film Adaptation of ‘Where
Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?’ ” Vision/Revision: Adapting Contemporary
American Fiction by W omen to Film, edited by Lupack, Bowling Green State U Popular
P, 1996, pp. 85-100.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?” 1966. The Norton
Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W. Norton, 2019,
pp. 114-26.
34.3.2 The List of Works Cited 1981
———. “ ‘Where Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?’ and Smooth Talk: Short Story
into Film.” (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, Dutton, 1988, pp. 316-21.
Smooth Talk. 1985. Directed by Joyce Chopra, performance by Laura Dern, MGM,
2006.
F O R M AT T I N G I N D IVI D UA L E N T R I E S — G E N E R A L PR I N CI P L E S
Though many, especially online, sources, as well as bibliographic programs such
as RefWorks and EndNote, w ill create or model works-cited entries for you, they
can rarely be trusted to get the format exactly right, especially given recent changes
to the MLA system. As a result, you should always double-check such entries against
the guidelines in this chapter and revise accordingly.
All information in a works-cited entry should come from the source itself. The
names of authors or other creators and contributors, for example, should appear in
your entry just as they do on the title page (if your source is a book); in a byline (if
your source is a periodical article or Web page); or in the credits (if your source is a
film or telev ision series). Thus, if a book’s title page indicates that its author is
“C. M. Bowra,” you should, too, even if your library catalog or another source about
the book refers to him as “Cecil Maurice Bowra.” (MLA does, however, give you the
option of providing especially important information missing from a source; on how
to do so correctly, see below, “Formatting Individual Entries—Additional Options.”)
Many sources do not stand on their own but are instead produced or experi-
enced as part of larger wholes—or what MLA calls containers. If you cite an article
in a journal or newspaper, for example, the article is your source; the journal or
newspaper is its container (as in the first example below). If you cite part of a Web
site, the part is your source; the Web site is the container (as in the second example
below). If you cite a poem, story, or play from this anthology, the poem, story, or
play is your source; the anthology is its container (as in the third example below).
In works-cited entries, the title of a container is italicized and followed by a
comma and then by all other required pieces of information about that container,
separated from each other by commas, with a period following the last piece (to
signal that you’ve gotten to the end of the information about that container). In the
following examples from our sample works cited, container titles are highlighted:
Article in an Online Newspaper

Canby, Vincent. “Film: ‘Smooth Talk,’ from Joyce Carol Oates Tale.” The New York
Times, 28 Feb. 1986, www.nytimes.com/1986/0
2/28/movies/film-smooth-talk
-from-joyce-carol-oates-tale.html.
Part of a Web Site

Dylan, Bob. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Bob Dylan, Sony M usic Entertainment,
bobdylan.com/songs/its-all-over-now-baby-blue/.
Short Story in an Anthology

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?” The Norton
Introduction to Litera t ure, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W. Nor-
ton, 2019, pp. 114–26.
Any one source may be contained within multiple containers, nested one inside
the other. If you access your journal article in an online database such as JSTOR
or on a Web site such as Google Books, for example, the article has two containers:
1) the journal containing the article and 2) the database or Web site containing
the journal. Works-cited entries need to include the titles of, and relevant publica-
tion and location information for, all containers, as in the example below (in which
container titles are again highlighted):
Article in a Journal Contained in a Database
Daly, Brenda O. “An Unfilmable Conclusion: Joyce Carol Oates at the Movies.” The
Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 23, no. 3, Winter 1989, pp. 101-14. Periodicals
Archive Online, ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/login?url= http://search.proquest.com
/docview/1297343870?a ccountid=3611.
Any one work can potentially be either a source or a container or both, depend-
ing on whether you cite the entire work or only part of it. To take a common
example, if you cite in your essay both Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness
and an editor’s introduction to it, then your works cited should include entries for
both: In one, the book Heart of Darkness would be the source (as in the first entry
below); in the other, the same book would be the container of the source, which is
the editor’s introduction (as in the second entry below).
Print Book
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Edited by Paul O’Prey, Viking Penguin, 1983.
Untitled introduction to a print book

O’Prey, Paul. Introduction. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, Viking Penguin,
1983, pp. 7-24.
F O R M AT T I N G I N D IVI D UA L E N T R I E S — C O R E , R EQ U I R E D E L E M E N T S
Including container titles, works-cited entries include up to nine core elements.
Generally speaking, these appear in the following order:
1 creator(s), usually author(s),
2 source title and/or description of source,
3 container title,
4 contributor(s),
5 version,
6 number,
7 publisher,
8 publication date, and
9 location.
T hese core elements are required elements: Each of them must be included when
it is relevant and available for a given source or container b ecause it is crucial to
identifying that source or container. Yet particular core elements w ill not always
be relevant or available: If a source or container exists in only one version, for
example, you need not include the “version” element; if its publication date isn’t
known, you may omit that element; and so on.
In addition to core, required elements, works-cited entries may include vari
ous optional elements. In the next section, we turn to the most important of
these, as well as one optional shortcut especially useful in literat ure essays. In
the rest of this section, we introduce the remaining eight core elements by
means of the crucial questions they answer rather than in the order they appear
in the entry.
WHO made it?
1. CREATOR(S): Except in three cases (specified below), all works- cited
entries begin with the name of the source’s creator, usually its author, followed by
a period, as in the following examples:
Source with One Author
Yoshida, Atsuhiko. “Epic.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Mar. 2014, www.britannica
.com/art/epic.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Washington Square Press, 1982.
If a source has multiple creators, list their names in the order the source does,
using the following format for two versus three or more creators:
Source with Two Authors
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1984.
Source with Three or More Authors

White, Karen, et al. The Forgotten Room. Berkley, 2016.
If your source is an interview, treat the interviewee as its author, regardless of who
gets credit in the source, as in the following example:
Interview
Munro, Alice. “Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137.” Interview by Jeanne
McCulloch and Mona Simpson. The Paris Review, no. 131, Summer 1994, www
.theparisreview.org/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro.
If a creator is someone other than an author, insert a comma and a descriptor

such as editor (for one person) or editors (for two or more) between the final name
and the period, as in the following examples:
Sources with Creators Other Than Authors (e.g., editors or directors)
Kitchen, Judith, and Mary Paumier Jones, editors. In Short: A Collection of Brief
Creative Nonfiction. W. W. Norton, 1996.
Chopra, Joyce, director. Smooth Talk. Performance by Laura Dern, MGM, 2006.
(Remember that if your works-cited list includes multiple sources by the same cre-
ator, the second and subsequent entries will substitute hyphens for the creator’s
name: See above, “Formatting the List.”)
In the following cases, begin your works-cited entry not with a creator but with a
SOURCE TITLE (#3, below):
• the source has no known author;
Anonymous Source
“The 10 Best Books of 2017.” New York Times Book Review, 30 Nov. 2017, www
.nytimes.com/interactive/2 017/books/review/10-best-books-2017.html.
• the source is authored by an organization that is also its publisher, as in

the following example (from the MLA Handbook):
Source Authored by Its Publisher

Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. National Endowment
for the Arts, June 2004.
• the source is a film or telev ision program, and your essay does not empha-
size the work of any particular person, as in the following example:
Smooth Talk. Directed by Joyce Chopra, performance by Laura Dern, MGM, 2006.
2. CONTRIBUTOR(S): In addition to creators, works-cited entries often must

acknowledge other important contributors to a source and/or its container. The
entry above, for example, includes two contributors to the film Smooth Talk—its
director (Joyce Chopra) and lead actress (Laura Dern). As this example demon-
strates, a contributor’s name should generally follow the title of the relevant source
or container and is always preceded by a description of the contributor’s role (in
this case, “directed by” and “performance by”).
Other kinds of contributors commonly acknowledged in lit
er
a
ture essays
include the following:
• Interviewers (versus interviewees)

Munro, Alice. “Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137.” Interview by Jeanne
McCulloch and Mona Simpson. The Paris Review, no. 131, Summer 1994, www
.theparisreview.o
rg/interviews/1791/the-art-of-fiction-no-137-alice-munro.
• Translators of works originally published in another language
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Joyce Crick, e-book, Oxford UP, 2009.
• Editors of particular editions of a source or of a container such as an
anthology
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Joyce Crick, edited by Ritchie
Robertson, e-book, Oxford UP, 2009.
Introduction to Litera t ure, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed.,
W. W. Norton, 2019, pp. 114–26.
• Illustrators
Pekar, Harvey. American Splendor: Bob and Harv’s Comics. Illustrated by R.
Crumb, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.
If a contributor to a source’s container is also the source’s creator, use only that
person’s last name in identifying his or her contribution, as in the following
example:
Source Whose Contributor Is Also Its Author
Rowell, Charles Henry. Preface. A
ngles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary
African American Poetry, edited by Rowell, W. W. Norton, 2013, pp. xxiii-xxvii.
Sometimes w hether a person is treated as a CONTRIBUTOR or a CREATOR w ill

depend on what you emphasize in or about a source in your essay. H ere, for exam-
ple, are two different entries for the same (film) source. The first would be appro-
priate if your essay highlighted the work of the film’s director, the second if your
essay attended more to an actor’s interpretation of a character:
Chopra, Joyce, director. Smooth Talk. Performance by Laura Dern, MGM, 2006.
Dern, Laura, performer. Smooth Talk. Directed by Joyce Chopra, MGM, 2006.
If what you cite or emphasize is the work of a source’s editor(s), translator(s), or

illustrator(s), then treat that person as the creator and the work’s author as a con-
tributor. In these cases, the author’s name is preceded by the word by, as in the
following examples:
Crick, Joyce, translator. The Metamorphosis. By Franz Kafka, edited by Ritchie Rob-
ertson, e-book, Oxford UP, 2009.
Crumb, R., illustrator. American Splendor: Bob and Harv’s Comics. By Harvey
Pekar, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.
Just remember that your in-text citations for a particular source must always coordi-
nate with your works-cited entry for that source: Both must refer to the same creator(s).
WHAT is it?
3. SOURCE TITLE AND/OR DESCRIPTION: Like the creator’s name, the
source’s title should be taken from the source, reproduced in full, and followed by
a period. But the title must be formatted according to the rules explained in 32.5,
since this standardized formatting ensures that your reader immediately recognizes
what kind of source it is.
For any untitled source, substitute a brief generic description. To clearly indi-
cate that it is not an a ctual title, capitalize only the first word and proper nouns;
do not enclose the description in quotation marks; and italicize only titles of
other works, if any, that appear in the description, as in the second example
below.
In literature essays, especially common types of untitled sources include
introductions, prefaces, forewords, afterwords, and reviews. Works-cited entries
for these usually need to treat the container’s author as a contributor (as with
Joseph Conrad in the first example below). In entries for reviews, your descrip-
tion should indicate the work being reviewed and its creator (as in the second
example below).
Untitled Introduction to a Print Book
O’Prey, Paul. Introduction. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, Viking Penguin,
1983, pp.7-24.
Untitled Review
Review of The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison. Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 1970.
Entries for titled prefaces, introductions, forewords, and afterwords should also include
the appropriate descriptor after the title, with a period separating the two (as in the
first example below). Though the MLA Handbook, 8th ed., does not require that titled
reviews be handled the same way (as in the second example below), your instructor
may prefer that you do so. Either way, descriptions, like titles, are followed by periods.
Titled Introduction to a Book
Ozick, Cynthia. “Portrait of the Artist as a Warm Body.” Introduction. The Best
American Essays 1998, edited by Ozick, Houghton Mifflin, 1998, pp. xv-xxi.
Titled Review
Marks, Peter. “ ‘ Water by the Spoonful’ Dispenses Measured Fury.” Review of Water
by the Spoonful, by Quiara Alegría Hudes. The Washington Post, 10 Mar. 2014,
www.washingtonpost.com/e ntertainment/theater_dance/w
ater-by-the
-spoonful-d
ispenses-m easured-fury/2014/03/10/8
40c1a68-a887-11e3-8a7b
-c1c684e2771f_story.html.
4. VERSION: If a source or container indicates that it is only one of multiple

versions or editions of a work, you must indicate which version or edition in order
to identify the source or container precisely—or to fully answer the “What is it?”
question. Identify the version or edition just as the source or container does, but
abbreviate the word edition to ed. (as in the second and third examples below).
(The first and last examples come directly from the MLA Handbook.)
The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.
Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Lite ra t ure. Revised
ed., Oxford UP, 1998.
Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W. Norton,
2019, pp. 114-26.
Scott, Ridley, director. Blade Runner. Performance by Harrison Ford, director’s cut,
Warner Bros., 1992.
Since an e-book is an electronic version of a book, it should be cited accordingly,

using either the generic descriptor e-book (as in the first example below) or a more
specific one such as Kindle ed., if available (as in the second example below).
E-Book
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Translated by Joyce Crick, edited by Ritchie
Robertson, e-book, Oxford UP, 2009.
Kindle Edition of a Book

MLA Handbook. 8th ed., Kindle ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2016.
5. NUMBER(S): If your source or its container is only one of a numbered

sequence of items, such as volumes, issues, or—in the case of television—seasons
and episodes, then specifying the relevant number(s) is also essential to precisely
identifying what it is. Each such number is preceded by the appropriate descriptor
and followed by a comma. The most common descriptors—volume and number—
can be abbreviated (as vol. or no.), but o
thers must be spelled out. (All but one of
the following examples come from the MLA Handbook.)
Journal Articles
Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 23, no. 3, Winter 1989, pp. 101-14. Periodicals
Archive Online, ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/login?url= http://search.proquest.com
/docview/1297343870?a ccountid=3611.
Kafka, Ben. “The Demon of Writing: Paperwork, Public Safety, and the Reign of
Terror.” Representations, no. 98, 2007, pp. 1-24.
Episode in a Series
“Hush.” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon, performance by Sarah
Michelle Gellar, season 4, episode 10, Mutant Enemy, 1999.
One Volume of a Multivolume Book

Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950. Vol. 5, Yale UP, 1986.
NOTE: If you cite multiple volumes of a multivolume work such as the one in the
last example above (Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism), your works-cited entry
ill omit this element, since your source is considered to be the entire work. (See
w
also “Optional Element: Number of Volumes in a Multivolume Work,” below.)
WHO published it?

6. PUBLISHER: Shorten publishers’ names by omitting business words and
abbreviations such as Company, Co., or Inc. and, for university presses, shorten-
ing University to U, Press to P, and University Press to UP, as in the following
examples:
Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “Smoothing Out the Rough Spots: The Film Adaptation of
‘Where Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?’ ” Vision/Revision: Adapting
Contemporary American Fiction by W omen to Film, edited by Lupack, Bowling
Green State U Popular P, 1996, pp. 85–100.
Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950. Vol. 5, Yale UP, 1986.
Omit publishers’ names entirely for the following sorts of sources and containers:
• periodicals (since a periodical retains its identity even when it changes
publishers);
• websites whose publishers are the same as their titles (e.g., The New York
Times, Encyclopedia Britannica); and

• websites, databases, or archives that
house sources whose content they have
not contributed to producing (e.g., YouTube, JSTOR, Periodical Archives
Online).
WHEN was it published?

7. PUBLICATION DATE: For a book or journal’s publication date, use the
most recent year on the title or copyright page; for Web pages, use the copyright
date or the date of most recent update, if available. For entire Web sites and mul-
tivolume print works developed over time, a date range may be indicated. (The
publication date of the online Blake Archive, for example, is 1996–2014; that of
the eight-volume History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 is 1955–92.) In giving
dates, abbreviate the names of all months except May, June, and July. And when
including day, month, and year, give the information in that order, as in the first
two examples below:
Entry in an Online Encyclopedia
Yoshida, Atsuhiko. “Epic.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Mar. 2014, www.b
ritannica
.com/art/epic.
Newspaper Article
Canby, Vincent. “Film: ‘Smooth Talk,’ from Joyce Carol Oates Tale.” The New York
Times, 28 Feb. 1986, www.n ytimes.com/1986/02/2 8/movies/film-smooth-talk
-from-joyce-c arol-o
ates-t ale.h
tml.
Journal Article
Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 23, no. 3, Winter 1989, pp. 101-14. ProQuest Peri-
odicals Archive Online, ezproxy.library.unlv.e du/login?url= http://search.proquest
ocview/1297343870?a ccountid=3611.
.com/d
Chapter in a Book
Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “Smoothing Out the Rough Spots: The Film Adaptation of
‘Where Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?’ ” Vision/Revision: Adapting
Contemporary American Fiction by W omen to Film, edited by Lupack, Bowling
Green State U Popular P, 1996, pp. 85-100.
WHERE can it be found?

8. LOCATION INFORMATION: If a container is paginated, include the page
number(s) on which the source appears, preceded by the abbreviation p. (for page,
if the source is only one page long) or pp. (for pages, if the source is two or more
pages). If you cite a periodical article that isn’t printed on consecutive pages,
include only the first page number followed by a plus sign (e.g., “pp. B1+”).
Alexie, Sherman. “When the Story Stolen Is Your Own.” Time, 6 Feb. 2006, p. 72.
For an online source or container, MLA requires including a digital object identifier
(DOI) preceded by doi: (with no space in between), if one is available. If not, MLA
recommends instead including a URL, copied in full except for the opener http://or
https://. Omit the URL, however, if your instructor prefers: B
ecause URLs, unlike
DOIs, are impermanent and unwieldy, they are strongly recommended rather than
strictly required.
Source with URL
Alexie, Sherman. “When the Story Stolen Is Your Own.” Time, 6 Feb. 2006, p. 72.
Academic Search Premier, connection.ebscohost.com/c/ essays/1 9551314/when
-story-stolen-your-own.
Source with DOI

Marcus, Mordecai. “What Is an Initiation Story?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, vol. 19, no. 2, Winter 1960, pp. 221–28. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/428289.
F O R M AT T I N G I N D IVI D UA L E N T R I E S — A D D I T I O N A L O P T I O N S
The core elements described in the last section are the only ones works-cited
entries must include, when those elements are available and relevant. Yet MLA
also allows you to include various optional elements, at your and your instructor’s
discretion. It also gives you the possibility of taking a shortcut when you cite mul-
tiple sources from a single collection or anthology. H ere we describe t hose options
most relevant to undergraduate literat ure essays.
• OPTIONAL SHORTCUT: CROSS- REFERENCE ENTRIES FOR
MULTIPLE SOURCES CONTAINED IN ONE COLLECTION
If you cite multiple sources from a single collection such as an anthology
according to the directions we’ve presented thus far, your list of works cited
w ill include multiple entries like the following that all repeat the same infor-
mation (here highlighted) about the anthology/container:
Dove, Rita. “Heroes.” Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary
African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell, W. W. Norton, 2013,
pp. 215-16.
Sanchez, Sonia. “A Poem for My Father.” A ngles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of
Contemporary African American Poetry, edited by Charles Henry Rowell, W. W.
Norton, 2013, p. 70.

Though these entries are perfectly correct, MLA encourages a two-step short-
cut. First, create one entry for the anthology that contains all the core elements.
Then, for each source you cite from that anthology, create a shortened, “cross-
reference” entry that includes only SOURCE CREATOR. SOURCE TITLE.
CONTAINER CREATOR(S)’S LAST NAME(S), LOCATION INFORMA-
TION. If we take this shortcut with our two sample entries above, for example,
we end up with the three more streamlined and readable ones below:
Dove, Rita. “Heroes.” Rowell, pp. 215-16.
Rowell, Charles Henry, editor. Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Con
temporary African American Poetry. W. W. Norton, 2013.
Sanchez, Sonia. “A Poem for My Father.” Rowell, p. 70.
As our highlighting in the above examples is meant to demonstrate, the end of

a cross-reference entry works like an in- text parenthetical citation: Each
refers readers to the entry that contains full publication information about
the container, while providing source-specific location information.
• OPTIONAL ELEMENT: ORIGINAL PUBLICATION INFORMATION
For a republished source, it’s often helpful to include information about when
and how the source was originally published. If you include only the original
publication date, place it immediately a fter the source title and follow it with
a period, as in the examples below:
Dylan, Bob. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” 1965. Bob Dylan, Sony Music Entertain-
ment, bobdylan.com/s ongs/its-all-over-now-baby-blue/.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You G oing, Where Have You Been?” 1966. The Nor-
ton Introduction to Lite ra ture, edited by Kelly J. Mays, shorter 13th ed., W. W.
Norton, 2019, pp. 114-26.
Smooth Talk. 1985. Directed by Joyce Chopra, performance by Laura Dern, MGM,
2006.
NOTE: The above examples demonstrate one virtue of including original publication
dates—they show readers how these three sources relate to each other chronologi-
cally: Oates’s short story originally appeared only a year a fter the Dylan song that
helped to inspire it; the film based on the story appeared nearly twenty years later.
When a source was originally published in a different form or container or

under a different title, you may want to give your reader more than its origi-
nal publication date. If so, all this information, including the date, belongs
at the very end of your citation. Precede it with a period and the phrase Origi-
nally published as (if the title has changed) or Originally published in (if it
hasn’t). Include all the relevant core elements, ordered and formatted as
they would be if they occurred elsewhere in your entry, as in the following
examples:
Source Republished with the Same Title

Nischik, Reingard M. “(Un-)Doing Gender: Alice Munro, ‘Boys and Girls’ (1964).” Con
temporary Literary Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 370, Gale, 2015.
Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.c om/ps/i.do?id= GALE%7CH1100118828&v
=2.1 &u= unlv_main&it= r&p= LitRC&sw=w&asid=1ec18259fbc8af3aecfc233e918cf0e
8. Originally published in The Canadian Short Story, edited by Nischik, Camden
House, 2007, pp. 203-18.

Source Republished with a Different Title

Strong, Roy. Painting the Past: The Victorian Painter and British History. Pimlico,
2004. Originally published as And When Did You Last See Your Father?: The
Victorian Painter and British History, Thames and Hudson, 1978.
• OPTIONAL ELEMENT: ACCESS DATE

Since an online work can change or disappear more readily than a print one,
knowing when you accessed it can be helpful to your reader, especially when the
source has no publication date. For this reason, earlier editions of the MLA
Handbook required that works-cited entries include access dates. This is now an
optional element, which we’ve thus omitted throughout this book. Some instruc-
tors may, however, prefer that you include this element. If so, the access date—
day, month, and year—comes after the relevant URL or DOI, preceded by a
period, a space, and the word Accessed, and followed by a period, as in the follow-
ing example:
Yoshida, Atsuhiko. “Epic.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Mar. 2014, www.britannica
.com/art/epic. Accessed 24 Jan. 2015.
With access dates, as with publication dates, abbreviate the names of all months
except May, June, and July.
• OPTIONAL ELEMENT: MISSING CORE ELE MENTS FROM AN
EXTERNAL SOURCE
When essential facts about a source (core elements) are not indicated in the
source itself, MLA recommends supplying them when you can, based on other
reliable sources. If so added, this information—publisher or publication date,
for example—should be placed exactly where it would normally go in the entry,
but enclosed in brackets to indicate that it does not come from the source. If
you are uncertain about the accuracy of this information, follow it with a ques-
tion mark (e.g., [1950?]); if a date is approximate, introduce it with the word
circa (e.g., [circa 1950]).
If you cite a newspaper whose title d oesn’t indicate the city in which it was
published, add the city, in brackets, after the title, as in the following example:
Malvern, Jack. “Globe Offers Shakespeare on Demand.” The Times [London], 4
Nov. 2014, p. 3. EBSCOhost Newspaper Source Plus, ezproxy.library.unlv.edu
/login?url= http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct= true&db= n5h&AN
=7EH92164329&site= ehost-live.
• OPTIONAL ELEMENT: NUMBER OF VOLUMES IN A MULTI

VOLUME WORK
If you cite more than one volume from a multivolume work, the entire work is
your source, and you w ill need only one entry for it. To make sure that your
readers immediately recognize it as a multivolume work and that they know
how many volumes it contains, you may end your entry with this information,
using the abbreviation vols. (for volumes), as in the following example:
Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. Yale UP, 1955-92. 8 vols.
(For instructions on how to format in-text parenthetical citations so that they

coordinate with this sort of entry, see 34.3.1, “Variations in Content: Indicat-
ing a Location within the Source.”)

The Norton Introduction To Literature, Shorter 13E

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Norton Introduction To Literature, Shorter 13E

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

34 QUOTATION, CITATION,

34.1 THE RULES OF RESPONSIBLE QUOTING

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1962 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.1.1 Cardinal Princi­ples

Repre­sen­ta­tion as O’Brien practices In this sentence from The Undying

INCORRECT VS. CORRECT

3. No change to a quotation, however much it accords with the rules outlined

34.1.2 Genre-­Specific Rules

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1963 8/29/18 1:21 PM

Georgiana’s birthmark becomes “a frightful object” only b ­ ecause “Aylmer’s som-

you ­were flaxen-­haired,

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1964 8/29/18 1:21 PM

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1965 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.1.3 General Rules and Strategies

• When necessary to the grammar of your sentence or the intelligibility of

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1966 8/29/18 1:21 PM

3. A s Mays explains, a writer “can In this sentence, the phrase “­these

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1967 8/29/18 1:21 PM

As an excited Ruth explains, the The first (unbracketed) ellipsis ­here

3. Charley gets to the heart of the Sic would be inappropriate h ­ ere,

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1968 8/29/18 1:21 PM

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1969 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.2 STR ATEGIES FOR EFFECTIVE QUOTING

1. S mith is highly critical of O’Brien’s

• Avoid drawing attention to your evidence as evidence with “filler” phrases

IN­E FFEC­T IVE QUOTATION EFFECTIVE QUOTATION

Words­worth calls nature a “homely Personifying nature as a “homely Nurse”

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1970 8/29/18 1:21 PM

A “homely Nurse” with “something of a

Tennyson advocates decisive Tennyson advocates forceful action,

3. Julian expresses disgust for the

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1971 8/29/18 1:21 PM

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1972 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.3 CITATION AND DOCUMENTATION

Bowra, C. M. The Romantic This coordinating works-­cited entry

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1973 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.3.1 Parenthetical Citation

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1974 8/29/18 1:21 PM

According to the narrator,

• If a sentence ­either incorporates material from multiple sources (as in the

• If, in a single paragraph, you make several uninterrupted references to the

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1975 8/29/18 1:21 PM

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1976 8/29/18 1:21 PM

1. As one of Joyce’s fellow writers points out, “To be absolutely faithful

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1977 8/29/18 1:21 PM

• Play with more than one act or scene

• Commonly studied work of fiction or nonfiction prose

• Works in which paragraphs are numbered

• Multiple volumes of a multivolume work

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1978 8/29/18 1:21 PM

nintrlit13esht_9pp_ch04_1910-2002.indd 1979 8/29/18 1:21 PM

34.3.2 The List of Works Cited

Article in an Online Newspaper

Part of a Web Site

Short Story in an Anthology

Untitled introduction to a print book

Source with Three or More Authors

If a creator is someone other than an author, insert a comma and a descriptor

• the source is authored by an organ­ization that is also its publisher, as in

Source Authored by Its Publisher

2. CONTRIBUTOR(S): In addition to creators, works-­cited entries often must

• Interviewers (versus interviewees)

Sometimes w ­ hether a person is treated as a CONTRIBUTOR or a CREATOR ­w ill

34.1.1 Cardinal Principles

Representation as O’Brien practices In this sentence from The Undying

34.1.2 Genre-Specific Rules

Georgiana’s birthmark becomes “a frightful object” only b ecause “Aylmer’s som-

you were flaxen-haired,

3. A s Mays explains, a writer “can In this sentence, the phrase “these

As an excited Ruth explains, the The first (unbracketed) ellipsis here

3. Charley gets to the heart of the Sic would be inappropriate h ere,

1. S mith is highly critical of O’Brien’s

INE FFECT IVE QUOTATION EFFECTIVE QUOTATION

Wordsworth calls nature a “homely Personifying nature as a “homely Nurse”

3. Julian expresses disgust for the

Bowra, C. M. The Romantic This coordinating works-cited entry

• If a sentence either incorporates material from multiple sources (as in the

• the source is authored by an organization that is also its publisher, as in

2. CONTRIBUTOR(S): In addition to creators, works-cited entries often must

Sometimes w hether a person is treated as a CONTRIBUTOR or a CREATOR w ill

4. VERSION: If a source or container indicates that it is only one of multiple

Since an e-book is an electronic version of a book, it should be cited accordingly,

When a source was originally published in a different form or container or

• OPTIONAL ELEMENT: ACCESS DATE

• OPTIONAL ELEMENT: NUMBER OF VOLUMES IN A MULTI

(For instructions on how to format in-text parenthetical citations so that they