InText Citations MLA Format Standard This part of

In-Text Citations MLA Format

Standard This part of the standard is our focus today. We will be discussing how to properly cite text in MLA format. Cite strong and thorough textual evidence

Modern Language Association • It provides many language resources for teachers and students.

• Formatting papers • In-text citations • Works Cited page

• If you don’t tell your reader where you got your information from, then it is considered plagiarizing, or taking someone else’s work and claiming it as your own. • Plagiarizing in class will get you a zero on an assignment. Stealing someone else’s ideas or work (books, movies, art, inventions) in real life without giving them credit can get you locked up! The owner could also take you to court and sue you.

MLA Format In-Text Citations Works Cited In this metaphor, each part of the MLA format is a link in a chain. Each is equally important and the chain will break if one is absent.

What is citing textual evidence? • Textual evidence is information that is copied directly or paraphrased from the text to support your answer or thesis. • A citation is when you refer to a specific passage from the text. • The best written answer to a question has both textual evidence and a citation.

Citation Format • The correct format for a citation is to put the author’s last name and page number in parentheses, followed by a period. The textual evidence itself should be put in quotation marks. • Format: “Textual Evidence” (Author’s Last Name Page #).

Example Breakdown Quotation Marks Textual Evidence Parentheses Quotation Marks Author’s Page # Last Name Period

Purdue Owl Example Notice in this example that there are several ways of giving the author credit. However, the author’s name should be mentioned, whether it is in the text leading up to your quote or in the citation.

Purdue Owl Example (cont. ) The example on the previous slide would then match up with this entry in your Works Cited page: Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. Oxford UP, 1967. The idea is that a person reading your paper could then look at your Works Cited page, find the author from your in-text citation, and then locate and read the original text (in this case, called Lyrical Ballads).

Works Cited Example from Purdue Owl Bazin, Patrick. “Toward Metareading. ” The Future of the Book, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg, U of California P, 1996, pp. 15368. Hollmichel, Stefanie. “The Reading Brain: Differences between Digital and Print. ” So Many Books, 25 Apr. 2013, somanybooksblog. com/2013/04/25/the-reading-braindifferences-between-digital-and-print/. “Under the Gun. ” Pretty Little Liars, season 4, episode 6, ABC Family, 16 July 2013. Hulu, hulu. com/watch/511318.

Common Student Mistakes with Citations • Not putting your quote in quotation marks. • Putting the period in the wrong place (it goes outside of the parentheses at the end). • Writing page, pg. or page number. You don’t have to write these; it is understood that it is a page number. • Putting the author’s first name along with the last name.

Practice

Practice 1. Which of the following is cited correctly?

Practice 1. Which of the following is cited correctly? B. “I would sometimes go for walks by myself in the late evening” (Beah 22).

Practice

Practice 2. Which of the following is cited correctly?

Practice 2. Which of the following is cited correctly? C. Krakauer discusses how the boy’s disappearance was not known to his family: “By then Chris was long gone” (22).

Citing our Textbook “Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws” (King 325).

Using a Colon Use a colon ( : ) to offset your answer and the textual evidence. Beah uses vivid imagery to emphasize the violence that child soldiers experience: “Blood was running down her dress and dripping behind her, making a trail” (13).

Using Ellipses to the quote. Use an ellipses (…) to indicate that there is more Full sentence from the text: My answer: We know all of this because Mc. Candless documented the burning of his money and most of the events that followed in a journal snap-shot album he would later leave with Wayne Westerberg for safekeeping before departing for Alaska. Chris’s character is developed through his reckless actions: “We know all of this because Mc. Candless documented the burning of his money…” (Krakauer 29).

Paraphrasing Textual Evidence paraphrase (put in your own words) Full sentence from the text: My answer: We know all of this because Mc. Candless documented the burning of his money and most of the events that followed in a journal snap-shot album he would later leave with Wayne Westerberg for safekeeping before departing for Alaska. Chris’s character is developed through his reckless actions. For example, after he leaves home he writes in his journal that he burns his money (Krakauer 29).

• You have now learned how to properly cite textual evidence in MLA format from a text. • You will use this skill in your ELA class every day in order to provide strong and thorough textual evidence. We will talk more how to choose specific textual evidence next class. • When we start writing essays or papers that require a Works Cited page, you now have an understanding of what that will look like. We will go over particulars then.

Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Sarah Crichton Books, 2007. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail. ” HMH Collections: Grade 10, edited by Beers et. al, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017, pg. 325. Krakauer, John. Into the Wild. Anchor Books, 1996. Modern Language Association of America. Modern Language Association, 2020, mla. org. Accessed 22 Aug. 2020. The Purdue OWL Family of Sites. The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue University, 2020, owl. english. purdue. edu/owl. Accessed 22 Aug. 2020.