MLA Citation Rundown

Here's a few of the major things you need to know for your MLA in-text citations- anything else can be found in the back of your A&B book.

To put a direct quote into a paragraph, "you need to set it up like this" (AuthorLastName page#).

* Do not put in a paragraph number, and if you don't have a page number because it's a web resource, just use the last name of the author. If there is no specific author, use the first word of the article title.

If you are paraphrasing, which means, if you are summarizing a story or bit of information you got from an article, you still need to provide the proper citation- it may be your words (So you don't need to put it in quotation marks) but it is still their information. Be sure to include at the end of the summary the (name page#).

Often quotes can seem a bit awkward just dropped into a paragraph. Always be sure to explain what the quote is saying and why it's important to your argument. Also, a handy cheat for putting a quote in and making it look natural there is to follow this format:

As Author says in their article article title, "insert the quote itself here" (page #).

Note, if you include the author name in the sentence itself, you DO NOT need to include afterwards with the page number.