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MLA Style Center

The definitive site for the Modern Language Association (MLA), the inventors of MLA Style

NotebookLM Chatbot to answer your MLA questions

Created by Marie Slaby and customized to the kinds of questions AISL student have. Access it via a browser that's not logged in to your AISL account.

Containers are the larger wholes in which the source is located. For example, if you want to cite a work (e.g. essay, short story, poem) from an anthology, the individual work is the source (in quotation marks), while the anthology is the container (in italics).  A container could also be a television series, which is made up of episodes, or a website, which contains articles and postings.

Gregerson, Linda. “The Sower against Gardens.” On Louise Glück: Change What You See, edited by Joanne Feit Diehl, University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp. 28-47.

“The Pontiac Bandit.” Brooklyn Nine-Nine, created by Dan Goor and Michael Schur, performance by Andy Samberg, season 1, episode 12, Fremulon, 2014.

In most cases, a word entry in an online dictionary includes a part of speech and numbered definitions, which should be included in the title. The original source is the container. To indicate the definition came from the web source by including the URL. The access date is optional, but include it if your teacher wants it.

“Moist, Adj. (1)” Merrian-Webster, 2023. wwww.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/content. Accessed 15 July 2022.

When you document an email in your list of works cited, make sure to include a reference to yourself, either by name or as author, as the Title of Source element.

Swift, Taylor. E-mail to the author. 15 February 2023.

Swift, Taylor. E-mail to Marie Slaby. 15 February 2023.

Personal interviews refer to those interviews that you conduct yourself. List the interview by the name of the interviewee. Include the descriptor "Personal interview" and the date of the interview.

Smith, Jane. Personal interview. 19 May 2024.

In your narrative, you should give the credentials of the person you interviewed, so the reader knows why they are a credible source on the topic. For example,

According to Jane Smith, the president of the board of trustees for the nonprofit Save the Pangolins, the number of pangolins has been ...

Look at your Works Cited page. Whatever the first element is--the one that is pushed out by the hanging indent--that is what goes in the parenthesis. If your source has page numbers, the number of the page goes after that. Usually this is the author's last name, so it looks like this (Slaby 10). Notice how the period is suspended to the end of the in-text citation, so it is included inside the sentence. 

For more a more detailed answer and examples, see slides 12-23 in the MLA Formatting and Style Guide slides linked at the top of this page.

Yes. This is particularly helpful when you summarize information found in multiple sources in one sentence or where you compile a table of data from multiple sources. In those cases, simply record the in-text citations as normal and separate them with a semi-colon.

For example:

 (Barbo and Alam 132; "Fast Lane" 16).

(Lisaingo et al. 26; Human Health Effects 7).

Note: These do not need to be in alphabetical order.

For more details, see this page in OWL and scroll down to the section on Figures.

In your essay, be sure to refer to images where they support your claim.  That helps the reader know when to look at them and why they are important evidence. 

For example, you might say, "The snow geese (see figure 1)..." or "As you can see if figure 1, the snow geese..."

See slides 25 (for prose) or 27 (for poetry) in the MLA Formatting and Style Guide slides linked at the top of this page.

See the section called LONG QUOTATIONS on OWL.

Check out the  ADDING OR OMITTING WORDS IN QUOTATIONS section on OWL.

The in-text citation for an interview conducted in another language that you then translated into English would simply be the surname of the interviewee and then an acknowledgement that you are the translator 

(Cao; my trans.).

Since you compiled the data yourself, you should introduce the note under your Table with "Sources:" followed by the information from the Works Cited page.

• Introduction: Use the phrase "Data compiled from..." to clarify that you built the table, but the numbers belong to others.

• Formatting: List the sources just as they would appear in your Works Cited list, but separate each source with a semicolon (;).
  
  Example Note

Sources: Data compiled from "Minimum Wage by State," United States Department of Labor, 2022, www.usdol.gov/minwage2022; Smith, John, "Economic Trends," The New York Times, 15 Jan. 2023. http://nyt.com/john-smith/economic-trends.

You can see a formatting Table example on Purdue OWL.

If you have three or more sources and their citations takes up too much space, you could include only an abbreviated form of the source--essentially whatever MyBib would say should be in the in-text citation--like this:

Sources: Data compiled from Minimum Wage by State; Smith.

This way the reader could go to your Works Cited page for the full reference and find it. But make sure this is okay with your teacher. S/he might want the full citations under the table. 

The full text of the tweet should be your title. Enclose the text in quotation marks, and include the date, time, and URL.

@loudpositivity. “Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.” Twitter, 27 May 2019, 12:17 p.m., https://twitter.com/loudpositivity/status/1133029562953142273.

If the author’s online handle is different from the account name, provide the handle in square bracket after the name.

Kass, Leon [@pianoman726] “Many (many) more professional photos to come. But this is one of the very few photos I took myself and I mean!” Twitter, 3 Srptember 2017, 3:03 p.m., twitter.com/pianoman726/status/ 752985641261162496.

When you reference the same source more than once in the same paragraph, and no other source intervenes, you may give the in-text citation just once at the end of the paragraph. If, however, this technique creates any ambiguity about your reference, it is better to cite the source every time you reference it.

For example:

Romeo and Juliet presents an opposition between two worlds: “the world of the everyday,” associated with the adults in the play, and “the world of romance,” associated with the two lovers. Romeo and Juliet’s language of love nevertheless becomes “fully responsive to the tang of actuality” (Zender 138, 141).

This makes clear that the first quotation is from the first page number in the parentheses, and the second quotation is from the second number.

There are other ways to do this as well. You may cite the author’s name with the page number after the first direct quotation, and just list the page number after the second quotation.

Romeo and Juliet presents an opposition between two worlds: “the world of the everyday,” associated with the adults in the play, and “the world of romance,” associated with the two lovers (Zender 138). Romeo and Juliet’s language of love nevertheless becomes “fully responsive to the tang of actuality” (141).

According to the MLA Style Center, try to access the original article in its entirety first. 

But if the entire article is not available, you may cite the abstract like this:

Ong, Yi-Ping. Abstract of “Anna Karenina Reads on the Train: Readerly Subjectivity and the Poetics of the Novel.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 5, Oct. 2018, p. 1302.

Best practice is always to go to the original source. By reading the original, you can verify if the information was taken out of context or quoted incorrectly. 

However, as a novice researcher, you might not have access to the original. Instead, you should cite the source where you actually accessed the information (not where it originally came from). You can cite something indirectly by using (qtd. in ...). In this case, in the in-text citation, you give credit both to the person who originally said the thing, as well as the name of the author whose article you found it in. However, the Works Cited list includes only the source you used, not the original.

Here are two examples from MLA Style Center. 

According to Alexander Pope, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing” (qtd. in Damrosch 239).

As a wise poet once wrote, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing” (Alexander Pope qtd. in Damrosch 239).

Work Cited

Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. U of California P, 1987. 

Source: https://style.mla.org/citing-screenshots-frame-captures/