Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [200]
“(Smith 74)” indicates the author’s last name and the page number on which the cited passage appears. If the author’s name had been mentioned in the sentence—had the sentence begun “According to Smith”—you would include only the page number in the citation. Note that there is no abbreviation for “page,” that there is no intervening punctuation between name and page, and that the parentheses precede the period or other punctuation. If the sentence ends with a direct quotation, the parentheses come after the quotation marks but still before the closing period. Also note that no punctuation occurs between the last word of the quotation (“recognized”) and the closing quotation mark.
End-of-text book citation: Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. Print.
End-of-text journal article citation: Cressy, David. “Foucault, Stone, Shakespeare and Social History.” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 121–33. Print.
End-of-text website citation: Landow, George, ed. Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English. Brown University, 2002. Web. 25 June 2010.
End-of-text citation of a journal article retrieved from a website: Nater, Miguel. “El beso de la Esfinge: La poética de lo sublime en La amada inmóvil de Amado Nervo y en los Nocturnos de José Asunción Silva.” Romanitas 1.1 (2006): n. pag. Web. 25 June 2010.
End-of-text library (subscription) database journal article citation: Arias, Judith H. “The Devil at Heaven’s Door.” Hispanic Review 61.1 (Winter 1993): n. pag. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 June 2010.
Note that the above citations all indicate a format type (print or web) and the web citations end with the date the researcher accessed the website or database.
MLA style stipulates an alphabetical list of references (by author’s last name, which keys the reference to the in-text citation). This list is located at the end of the paper on a separate page and entitled “Works Cited.”
Each entry in the Works Cited list is divided into three parts: author, title, and publication data. Each of these parts is separated by a period from the others. Titles of book-length works are italicized, unless your instructor prefers underlining. (Underlining is a means of indicating italics.) Journal citations differ slightly: article names go inside quotations, no punctuation follows the titles of journals, and a colon precedes the page numbers when pagination is known.
D. Integrating Quotations into Your Paper
Writers lose authority and readability when they fail to correctly integrate quotations into their own writing. The following guidelines should help, but keep in mind that not all disciplines encourage (or even permit) writers to include quotations. In those disciplines, such as psychology and the natural sciences, the comments below would then apply to integrating paraphrase or summary.
1. Acknowledge sources in your text, not just in citations. When you incorporate material from a source, attribute it to the source explicitly in your text—not just in a citation. In other words, when you introduce the material, frame it with a phrase such as “according to Marsh” or “as Gruen argues.”
Although it is not required, you are usually much better off making the attribution overtly, even if you have also cited the source within parentheses or with a footnote at the end of the last sentence quoted, paraphrased, or summarized. If a passage does not contain an attribution, your readers will not know that it comes from a source until they reach the citation at the end. Attributing upfront clearly distinguishes what one source says from what another says and, perhaps more important, what your sources say from what you say. Useful verbs for introducing attributions include the following: notes, observes, argues, comments, writes, says, reports, suggests, and claims.