The Writing and Communication Services, formerly known as the Center for Writing and Communication (CWC), housed on the first floor of McWherter Library, offers free, individual consultations with trained staff. Get feedback on your writing and speaking assignments at any stage in the process.
MLA Style uses parenthetical citations, so that citation information is often, though not always, included in parentheses. The basic format is to put the author's surname and, if available, the location of the information, which could be a page number or line number, for example. It will be included in the sentence after the information you want to cite, often at the end of the sentence before the punctuation.
Let's look at an example. We want to cite this scholarly article in the text. The author is "Farrah Bara," so we would cite the surname "Bara." The publication date is the year 2019. So a parenthetical citation would look like this:
The 1978 consent degree between the City of Memphis and its citizens is a useful example of how protect First Amendment rights (Bara).
It's worth noting that "the successful protection of protesters in Memphis—made without reliance on the Constitution—indicates that other legal solutions exist" (Bara 203).
There is an alternative way to format an in-text citation in MLA, called a prose citation. In a prose citation, the author or title is written into your sentence so they are part of your prose. If needed, the location will still be in parentheses at the end of the sentence.
Here is an example of a prose citation for the same source from above:
Bara remarks that "the successful protection of protesters in Memphis—made without reliance on the Constitution—indicates that other legal solutions exist" (203).
MLA calls the complete list of works cited at the end of a paper with all the information needed to get access to them the Works Cited page. Each citation entry in the Works Cited requires a few basic elements: author, title of source, and the elements of the container of the source. Each element tells you something important about the cited source. If the element you are looking for isn't present, then skip it.
Let's look at the elements that make up the MLA citation for this scholarly article:
Bara, Farrah. “From Memphis, With Love: A Model to Protect Protesters in the Age of Surveillance.” Duke Law Journal, vol. 69, no. 1, 2019, pp. 197–229.
MLA Handbook 9th ed.
by
