Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
MLA 8 Presentation
8
MLA 8 Workshop
Research in MLA and In-Text Citations
Laura Henning, Writing Specialist
DSC-UCF Writing Center
The Importance of MLA
What is MLA Style?
MLA Style may at first seem like just a bunch of dumb rules you have to follow, something that your professor expects you to do but has no real meaning beyond an empty requirement. This, however, is not the case! MLA Style is important because it creates both consistency and clarity in different discipline's research. Because researchers have to follow specific guidelines for formatting and citations in their work, other researchers and lay readers are able to better follow the text's argument(s) and movement from source to source.
Why Use MLA?
The Purdue OWL identifies three main reasons abiding by MLA's standards is important:
- "[It] provide[s] your readers with cues they can use to follow your ideas more efficiently and to locate information of interest to them."
- "[It] allow[s] readers to focus more on your ideas by not distracting them with unfamiliar or complicated formatting."
- "[It] establishes your credibility or ethos in the field by demonstrating an awareness of your audience and their needs as fellow researchers (particularly concerning the citing of references)."
Who Typically Uses MLA?
MLA Style is generally utilized by writers, students, and researchers conducting work in the humanities. You will most often encounter MLA style in the following disciplines: English Literature and Language, Comparative Literature, Foreign Languages, Cultural Studies, and Literary Criticism.
Research in MLA
Best Practices for Conducting Research
The Importance of Building Ethos
Ethos, or ethical appeal, is a rhetorical device used to convince audiences (readers) of an author's credibility or character. Establishing crediblity is important, since it not only makes your argument more persuasive, but also impresses upon your audience the importance of what you have to say.
Building Ethos
Ways to establish ethos:
- Be thorough in your research
- Select articles from credible sources only (e.g. peer-reviewed journals)
- Cite everything!
- Proofread, proofread, proofread
Choosing Credible Sources
Finding and Choosing Sources
Where to look?
- DSC Library database
- Google Scholar
- Reference/help desk (Daytona and DeLand campuses)
What to look for?
- Peer-reviewed journals and articles
- Amount of citations by other professionals
- Who, when, and where of publication
General Formatting
General Formatting
- Use a legible, 12-pt. font, such as Times New Roman.
- Maintain double spacing throughout, even on the Works Cited page.
- Set the margins to 1" on all sides.
- Create a header in the upper right-hand corner that numbers all pages consecutively. Put your last name before the page number. TIP: Insert the page number function first before writing your last name, otherwise your last name will be deleted when you insert the page number (Word is cranky like that sometimes!).
- If you have any Endnotes, put them on a separate page before your Works Cited page.
- Print your work on standard 8.5 x 11-inch paper.
First Page Guidelines
Formatting the First Page
- Do not include a cover page (unless directed otherwise).
- List your name, your professor's name, the course, and the date (day month year format) in the upper left-hand corner of the first page.
- Center your title, and do not underline, italicize, or bold it.
- The only time you will italicize or add quotation marks around any part of your title is when you have a title of a work within the title of your paper.
- Do not add an extra space between the aforementioned information in the upper left-hand corner, nor the title and your first line of text.
General Guidelines
MLA uses author-page format for in-text citations. Unlike APA style, you do not include the year of publication in MLA in-text citations. The author's name can appear either in the signal phrase or in the parenthetical citation following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page numbers must always appear in the parenthetical.
In-Text Citations
This might seem like common sense, but the information you provide in your in-text citation must correspond to the information you have on your Works Cited page. Think of that in-text information as a handle that leads your readers to the entry in your Works Cited.
That said, whatever appears as the first bit of
information in the Works Cited entry
should be what is in the in-text citation.
Author Situations You'll Probably Encounter
How to Cite Different Kinds of Authors
For print sources (e.g., books, articles, magazines) with a known author:
Cite the author's last name and page number.
Ex. Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (263).
Ex. Romantic poetry is characterized by the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth 263).
For print sources by a corporate author:
It is okay to use the name of the corporation, along with the page number, in the in-text citation.
For print sources with no known author:
Use a shortened version of the title of the work in place of the author's name.
More Situations
For authors with the same last names:
Provide each author's first initial to differentiate between them.
For works with multiple authors:
List the authors' last names in either the signal phrase or the parenthetical citation. If there are more than three authors, however, list only the first author's name and replace the other names with et al. (Latin for "and others").
For multiple works by the same author:
Use a shortened title of the work you are citing in order to distinguish it from the author's other works.
Even More Situations!
For indirect sources:
These are situations in which a source is cited in another source. Use "qtd. in" to indicate that the source appears in another source.
Ex. Ravitch argues that high schools are pressured to act as "social service centers, and they don't do that well" (qtd. in Weisman 259).
Even More Situations!
Citing non-print sources or sources from the Internet:
The Purdue OWL explains these kinds of citations well--
Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).
You do not need to give paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.
Unless you must list the Web site name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like CNN.com or Forbes.com as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.