English III: Documenting Research Papers

MLA Parenthetical Style: Basic Procedures

Parenthetical citing
1. Cite the source in parentheses immediately after the material used:
As one famous psychologist has written, One cannot afford to be nave in dealing with dreams (Jung, Approaching 52).
2. If the author of your source has written no other work cited in your paper, give just the authors last name and the page number(s):
As one traffic analyst observes, no police force can arrest everyone who violates a traffic law (Gardiner 5).
3. If you use the authors name to introduce the source, do not repeat the name in parentheses. Give just the page number(s):
As Carl Jung says, One cannot afford to be nave in dealing with dreams (52).
But use a title word before the page number(s) if you are citing another work by the same author elsewhere:
According to Margaret Mead, all of us need to define ourselves by making some mark on the place we occupy or putting a special object
there (Blackberry 12).
4. When quoting a passage that must be indented from your text because it is more than four lines long, put the citation one space after the final
punctuation mark:
Virginia Woolf writes as follows about the role of women in literature and history:
A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely
insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and
conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. (60)
5. If all your quotations come from just one source, as in a paper written about a work of fiction, cite the source by page number(s) aloneafter
mentioning the author and title in your text.
Meridel Le Sueurs The Girl is the story of what happens when a prim, unmarried, unnamed schoolteacher sets out to drive alone from
Southern California to San Francisco. () But the story makes it clear that in rejecting his desires, she also stifles her own, dooming
herself to a life of repressive order in which she will never never change (212).
6. If your use of source material ends in the middle of a sentence, you may put the citation there:
During the ride itself, neither her fear of being touched nor her annoyance at being flattered just as if she were any common slut (209)
can altogether keep her from showing off.
Listing the works cited
1. Start the list on a separate page at the end of your paper. All the works you have cited should be listed alphabetically by the authors last name, or
by the title if the source is unsigned:
Deacon, Terence. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and Brain. New York: Norton, 1997.
Kermode, Frank. Sensing Endings. Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 (1978): 14458.
Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. Ripening: Selected Work, 19271980. Ed. Elaine Hedges. Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1982. 20412.
Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1942.
. A Room of Ones Own. New York: Fountain, 1929.
2. Complete information on MLA: Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. New York: MLA, 1999.

Citing and listing various sources

1. Book by one author
a. (Kastely 30)
b. Kastely, James L. Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.
2. Book by two or three authors
a. (Kinder and Sanders 6)
b. Kinder, Donald R., and Lynn M. Sanders. Divided by Color. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
3. Book by four or more authors
a. (Medhurst et al. 19)
b. Medhurst, Martin J., Robert L. Ivie, Philip Wander, and Robert L. Scott. Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor, and Ideology. New York:
Greenwood, 1990.
4. Book with editor
a. (Green 164)
b. Green, Philip, ed. Democracy: Key Concepts in Critical Theory. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1993.
5. Multivolume work
a. (Smith 1: 151)
b. Smith, Page. A New Age Now Begins. 2 vols. New York: McGraw, 1976.
6. Material quoted by your source
a. (qtd. in Watkins 1)
b. Watkins, Beverly T. 2-Year Colleges Told Theyre Becoming Institutions for Middle Class Students. Chronicle of Higher Education 11 Apr.
1984: 1.
7. An introduction, foreword, or afterword
a. (Rebhorn ix)
b. Rebhorn, Wayne. Introduction. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. By Janet M. Atwill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.
8. Article, essay, or any other short work in a book
a. (Cox 133)
b. Cox, James M. Recovering Literatures Lost Ground Through Autobiography. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Ed. James
Olney. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 12345.
9. Work from an anthology
a. (Kincaid 321)
b. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Ugly Tourist. The Norton Reader. Linda H. Peterson, John C. Brereton, and Joan E. Hartman. New York: Norton,
1999. 32022.
10. Play with act, scene, and line numbers (do not cite page numbers)
a. Romeo and Juliet (2.2.3) or (II.ii.3)
b. Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. John E. Hankins. Baltimore: Penguin, 1970.
11. Poem with numbered lines
a. Robert Frosts Death of the Hired Man (lines 11819)
b. Frost, Robert. The Death of the Hired Man. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, 1969. 3440.
12. Electronic source
a. Author of website / Title of website / Date of publication (n.d. if not provided) / Date of access / Address
b. Mostern, Kenneth. Home Page. 25 August 1998. 8 November 1999. <http://web.utk.edu/hybridmarx.html>
13. Movie
a. Pirates of Silicon Valley. Dir. Martyn Burke. Perf. Noah Wyle and Michael Hall. TNT Original, June 26, 1999.