Rachel Kramer
Research Librarian
she/her/hers
MCC Learning Commons
rkramer@mclennan.edu
254-299-8390
This information has been copied and adapted from the Purdue OWL, an excellent resource on citation. Visit their website for more information.
In MLA Style, creating in-text citations involves providing information about your source in parentheses whenever a sentence uses a quotation, paraphrase, or summary. Usually, the simplest way to do this is to put all of the source information in parentheses at the end of the sentence (just before the period). However, as the examples below show, there are situations where it makes sense to put the information elsewhere in the sentence, or even to leave information out.
MLA Style follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the information is taken must appear in the text. The author's name may appear in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation, paraphrase or summary, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence. For example:
Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (263).
Romantic poetry is characterized by the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth 263).
Wordsworth extensively explored the role of emotion in the creative process (263).
Both citations in the examples above, (263) and (Wordsworth 263), tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page 263 of a work by an author named Wordsworth. If readers want more information about this source, they can turn tot he Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. Oxford UP, 1967.
Need help understanding MLA's citation style?
The links below lead to useful MLA information.
A citation generator may serve as a starting place to help you create citations.
The recommended citation generator for this course is Scribbr.
However, you can't rely only on a generator to create your Works Cited pages. They often contain errors, especially in formatting and punctuation, or don't include all the needed information.
You must crosscheck your machine-generated citations against a writing style guide website, like the Purdue OWL, which will show you each part needed for each kind of citation you are creating.
