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Citing Sources

In order to properly cite your authors' works within your paper (parenthetical citations) and as a list at the end of the paper (Works Cited), a certain style guide or manual must be followed. This style guide ensures that all English papers will be cited the same way and that all readers will understand what is being cited. The style guide that is used for English classes is called Modern Language Association or MLA. This lesson will teach you about the basics of MLA, but if you have further questions you can consult an MLA handbook in your school's library or you can check online at OWL: Purdue Online Writing Lab.

Citing Sources

Let's start by discussing parenthetical citations. Inside of your paper, when you use information from a secondary source, certain identifying information will be required inside some parentheses after the information.

Here are some tips to know when a citation is needed:

  • when quoted or paraphrased (put into your own words) ideas are
    taken from a source,
  • when a summary of original ideas by a source is used,
  • when factual information is used that is not considered common knowledge, and
  • when more than three consecutive words are copied directly from a
    source.

Citing Sources

A lot of times students think that they only have to cite information when they use quotation marks. This is not true! Ideas or information that is put in your own words must also be cited because it is not your original work or thought.

Citing Sources

Here are some hints to keep in mind while you are working:

  • Get in the habit of "leading into" borrowed material by introducing the
    person's name before you quote or paraphrase his/her words.
  • If you copied it directly, enclose it in quotation marks.
  • When you paraphrase, you can't just insert a couple of synonyms or
    change two or three words. A paraphrase must be all of your own words,written in your own style. And, it still must be cited because it's not your own thought.
  • Citations inside the paper need to come immediately after any information that has been directly copied, summarized, or paraphrased.
  • Every source whose information you use within the paper must be cited
    in the Works Cited page at the end of the paper.

Citing Sources

Parenthetical Citations or In-Text Citations:
Since this lesson deals with the overall MLA formatting, we are not going to get into the specifics of how to actually write the parenthetical citations. A thorough explanation of parenthetical citations will occur in Lesson 7: In-Text Citations. For now, however, you just need to know what information to write down from the sources that you are using. It is better to write this information down while you are researching rather than having to look it all up again at the end when you are preparing the final draft.

Here is the information you will need to be sure to get while you are researching. More information is available at Purdue OWL.

  • Author's first and last names
  • Title of the book, article, or internet site
  • Page number from books or articles where you copied information

Works Cited:
At the end of your document, you will need to prepare a list of all of the sources that you have used in your paper. Even though you probably consulted more sources than you actually used in your paper, you do not need to cite them on the Works Cited page unless you actually cited from them in the paper.

The Works Cited page is the last page of your document and should be numbered consecutively after the paper. So, if the last page of your paper is 5, then the Works Cited page will be page 6.

More information is available at Purdue OWL.

The list should be in alphabetical order by either the author's last name (if available) or the title of the site (when the author's name is unavailable).

Also, the individual entries must have a hanging indent. This means that the first line is flush left and the next line is indented. This is the reverse of what a paragraph looks like.

Here is the information you will need to be sure to get while you are researching:

  • Publishing company
  • Publishing state
  • Copyright date
  • Type of media – print or web
  • Date you accessed the information
  • Volume and issue numbers

 

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