MLA In-Text Citations

Greetings, writers! It's Mr. Hebner from the Lackawanna College Writing Center, and in this episode, we're going to discuss MLA in-text citations.

So, what are in-text citations anyway? Well, they're a way to give credit where credit's due and cite sources in an essay. Sometimes we might hear them called parenthetical or internal citations. Just know that those two terms refer to the same thing: in-text citations.

Now, in-text citations are not works cited pages. However, although both in-text citations and a works cited page are required when we use outside sources in a paper, to help us tell the difference between these two types of citations, I set up a quick chart.

In-text citations are short, and they go in parentheses at the ends of sentences within an essay. Whereas works cited page citations are long and detailed, and they don't go at the ends of sentences. Instead, they go in a list on a separate page at the end of an essay.

So, why do we need in-text citations anyway? Well, think about it. When you write an essay, you want credit for your hard work. It's the same thing with the authors of our sources. If we don't give them credit for their hard work, we could get in trouble. We could be charged with plagiarism.

All right, now plagiarism refers to, among other things, the stealing of information. Just as someone can steal a car or a cell phone or any other object and face real-world consequences, the same thing happens when someone steals ideas, such as copying and pasting information from a website into an essay and trying to pass it off as one's own.

So, plagiarism results in some serious penalties. Here at Lackawanna College, the first time a student is caught plagiarizing, they get a zero on that assignment. The second time the student plagiarizes, they get an F in the class. Other schools have similarly harsh penalties.

But don't worry! I'll help you avoid plagiarism charges by showing you how to credit sources properly. So, MLA makes things easy for us. They use the author-page number format to help us organize their in-text citations, and it looks something like this.

Notice here we have the last name of the author plus the page number that we found our information on, all wrapped up in parentheses. Notice there's no commas here. So, APA formatting uses commas in their in-text citation, but not in MLA. The period comes after the citation, and that's because the citation goes at the end of a sentence that uses outside information, quoted or paraphrased.

Let's check out an example. So here we have an in-text citation, and it follows the same rules that we covered in the last slide. We've got the author's last name there with a page number that we found our quote on, all in parentheses. We've got no comma in there. The period comes after the citation, and our citation's at the end of the sentence in which we have a direct quote.

Here's another example. Let's say that we wanted to use the author's name in the sentence. In that case, then we only have to put the page number that we found our information on at the end in parentheses. It would look something like this.

So right here we have the author's name, and notice we use the whole name here, not just the last name. Then we wouldn't have to put the last name of the author in our parentheses; we just have the page number we found our quote on.

Uh-oh! What if we can't find an author's name or a page number? Well, the goal of our citations is to provide as much information as possible for the reader to help them find our sources because they might be interested in checking them out too.

So oftentimes, students run into this issue when they're using a web page as a source. Web pages don't have page numbers, but they might have an author's name on them. So check the top and the bottom of the page to see if you can find an author's name. If so, then you can use the author's last name in parentheses without a page number as your citation.

But if not, then you can follow this format: use a shortened version of the web page title in quotation marks. It looks something like this.

All right, here's my final tip for you: cite as you write. So while you're writing your essay, plug in those in-text citations as you go, even if you have to use some kind of shorthand notes to help you differentiate which source you got information from.

You can always go through before you submit the assignment and revise those notes into the proper author-page number or shortened title format. Now, I recommend doing this because it helps you avoid having to go through your essay sentence by sentence and try to figure out, "Now, where did I get that information from again?"

Instead, this will help save you some time. And speaking of time, we're all out of time! So here's some citations for the sources used in our video. If you want to see how to make those kinds of citations, check out our videos on the Lackawanna College Writing Center YouTube channel.

And keep on writing, everybody! Mr. Hebner out.