Writing In-Text Citations
"The goals of the in-text citation are brevity and clarity, guiding the reader as unobtrusively as possible to the correspdoning entry in the works-cited list."
MLA Handbook, Eighth Edition
Refer to the examples below to review ways of creating an in-text citation.
|
Material Type |
In-Text Citation Example |
|
Author's name in text |
According to Naomi Baron, reading is "just half of literacy. The other half is writing" (194). One might suggest that reading is never complete without writing. |
|
Author's name in reference |
Reading is "just half of literacy. The other half is writing" (Baron 194). |
|
Two authors' names in reference |
The dataset includes information on the entire population of children who have dropped out of North Carolina’s public schools (Stearns and Glennie 37). |
|
Quotation found in indirect or "secondhand" source |
Samuel Johnson admitted that Edmund Burke was an "extraordinary man" (qtd. in Boswell 2: 450). |
Punctuation in the In-Text Citation
No punctuation is used in a basic parenthetical citation with MLA 8th Edition, rather it consists only of a number or of an author's last name with a number. There are instances in which a complex citation may require punctuation for clarity.
See the following examples:
|
Citations of multiples sources in a single parenthesis |
(Baron 194; Jacobs 55) |
|
Citations of different locations in a single source |
(Baron 194, 200, 197-98) |
|
Multiple works by same author will be joined by and if there are two titles |
(Glück, "Ersatz Thought" and "For") |
|
If the number in a citation is not a page or line number, |
(Chan, par. 41) (Rowley, ch. 2) |
See page 126 of the MLA Handbook for more information regarding punctuation in in-text citations.
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