MLA Style Guide

Narrative In-Text Citations

An in-text citation is required whenever the writer quotes, paraphrases, or summarizes from the source. A narrative in-text citation consists of the author's last name within the text as part of the sentence followed by a page number within a parenthesis. 

Citation:

Boggs, Colleen Glenney. “Public Reading and the Civil War Draft Lottery.” American Periodicals, vol. 26, no. 2, 2016, pp. 149–166. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=shib&db=lih&AN=117364849&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

In-Text Citation:

Boggs claims that the Civil War draft lottery was held in major cities and well as rural towns (149).

1 Author

Boggs claims...(149). 

2 Authors

Abdo and Bobroff state...(172). 

3 Authors (or more)

Similarly, as Belenky et al. assert...(7).  

Government/Organizational Author

The United States, Dept. of Labor directs...(147). 

Government/Organizational Author (no publication date)

U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicates...

Government/Organizational Author (no page number)

According to the Mayo Clinic... 

Webpage (Webpage no page number)

The webpage "Climate Change Impact" provides information on...

Webpage (with the author but no page number)

Davis reported that ... 

No Author - Article

In "Homily" ...(97).

This page is adapted with permission from "MLA Style Guide: In-Text Citations" by Broward College Libraries.

Paraphrasing/ Quotations

Paraphrasing:

According to the MLA, a paraphrase restates another’s idea in your own words. Paraphrasing allows you to keep your voice while summarizing and synthesizing information from one or more sources. Students should paraphrase their sources most of the time, rather than directly quoting the sources.

Example: Webster-Stratton (26) described a case example of a 4-year-old girl who showed an insecure attachment to her mother; in working with the family dyad, the therapist focused on increasing the mother’s empathy for her child.

Quotation: 

According to the MLA, a direct quotation uses the exact words from another work. You would use a direct quote when the content is particularly compelling, it's important to your thesis, or the phrasing/language is important to the context of your paper. It is best to paraphrase sources rather than directly quoting them because paraphrasing allows you to fit material to the context of your paper and writing style.

Example: Effective teams can be difficult to describe because “high performance along one domain does not translate to high performance along another” (Ervin et al., 470).

Example: for a long quotation (more than 4 typed lines - block quote) do not use quotation marks:

Researchers have studied how people talk to themselves: 

Inner speech is a paradoxical phenomenon. It is an experience that is central to many people’s everyday lives, and yet it presents considerable challenges to any effort to study it scientifically. Nevertheless, a wide range of methodologies and approaches have combined to shed light on the subjective experience of inner speech and its cognitive and neural underpinnings. (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough 957)

This page is adapted with permission from "MLA Style Guide: In-Text Citations" by Broward College Libraries.