CITATION GUIDE

Paranthetical Citation: MLA Style
The Modern Language Association publishes, in The MLA Handbook, the method of citation that we will be employing in this course. The MLA style allows documentation of an abbreviated kind to appear in teh body of your essay in parantheses, and eliminates all but explanatory footnotes. The paranthetical citations will refer your reader to a list of "Works Cited" in which all sources quoted or referred to will be alphabetically arranged. A "Works Cited" page must accompany every essay that contains material cited from any other source, including the literary work on which you are writing.

What to Cite in the Body of Your Paper
1. If you introduce a quotation, fact, or paraphrase by mentioning the author's name, you need only provide the page number in quotations.

An early authority on fairy tales, Henry Bett, claims that the whole study was shoddy but "very instructive" (53).

2. If you do not mention the author's name before you quote, you should include the surname in parantheses.

One early authority on fairy tales referred to the whole study as shoddy but "very instructive" (Bett 53).

3. If you refer to more than one work by the same author, supply a short title (Nursery Rhymes 62). If the name is not mentioned, supply the surname, followed by a comma, a short title,and then the page number (Bett, Nursery Rhymes 62).

The "Works Cited" Page: Sample Entries
1. A book.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

1b. A book that has been reprinted.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Penguin, 1976.

2. A work in an anthology.

Roethke, Theodore. "My Papa's Waltz." The Habrace Anthology of Literature. 2nd ed. Eds. Stott, et al. Toronto: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998. 325-326.

3. An essay in a scholarly journal (with volume and issue number).

DeForrest, Matthew. "Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy: Individuality and the Psychological." Éire-Ireland 29.3 (1994): 126-136.

3b. If the article appears in a journal that only uses volume numbers, then cite the work as follows:

Foster, Roy. "We Are all Revisionists Now." The Irish Review 1 (1986): 1-5.

4. A work published on the world wide web.

If the article appears in an electronic journal, then provide all of the information you would for an article in a print journal, follwoed by the URL in angle brackets, and the date you accessed the file in parantheses:

McNeilly, Kevin. "Ugly Beauty: John Zorn and the Poitics of Postmodern Music." Postmodern Culture 5.2 (Jan. 1995)
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v005/5.2mcneilly.html>(7 Feb. 1997).

If the article is simply posted as an essay on a world wide web page, provide the author's name (if it is known), the title of the document (in quotation marks), the date of last revision (if known), the URL (in angle brackets), and the date you accessed the file (in parantheses):

Rollston, Bill. "Culture, Conflict, and Murals: The Irish Case."
< www.zonezero.com/magazine/distant/zcultu2.html >(October 15, 1997).

In the above example, the date of last revision is unknown.

If you have any further questions on the MLA citation method, please consult the following works:

Joseph Gibaldi.The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 4th ed. New York: MLA of America, 1995.

As well, your essay writing text offers a brief section on documentation (pp.273-280).

If you are unable to cite a particular work after consulting either of these two sources, then please come to see me.

Remember you can download a copy of this citation guide for personal use in either WordPerfect or MS WORD format.