In-Text Citation

In-text Citation is when you credit a fact, statement or opinion within your written work with the original source from where it came from. In this way by citing your sources in text you:

• • Provide evidence of your work.

  • Shows the amount of research that you have done.

  • Provide a path showing your thought and research process so that others can follow, copy, prove, or disprove that process.

  • Give credit to the sources from where you found your information, or developed the ideas that you are using in your research, and thus avoid Academic Dishonesty.

Citing is a great way to give evidence of the investigation undertaken. When you evaluate someone else's work, or when you compare and contrast arguments from different authors, you are demonstrating that multiple sources have been reviewed and evaluated within the course of your project.

Quoting and Paraphrasing

There are two methods through which we refer to, or give credit to, other people's ideas in our work. Those are Quoting and Paraphrasing.

• Quoting: replicating word for word what another source says.

• Paraphrasing: using your own words to communicate the ideas of the original source.

Click HERE to understand more about when you quote and when to paraphrase.

Formatting your MLA-8 Citation

No matter if you are quoting or paraphrasing, you always cite in the same manner, by acknowledging the Author’s Last Name and the page number where you found it. This information is written as a parenthesis at the end of what you are citing.

For example, (Rowling 47).

However, there are many cases where how you present the information changes. Use the scrollable table below of a list of these instances.

It is also possible that if you mention the author, source title and/or location of the information in the text itself as part of the portion you are citing, then you may omit it from the parentheses.

For example:

It is a fact that our body and the universe share similar elements. As astronomer María Teresa Ruiz once said, It is wonderful to “think that hydrogen atoms in my tears were made during the Big Bang and that the calcium atoms in my bones, the oxygen in my blood and all the elements that form part of me were all made by stars” (116).

Footnotes:

In MLA-8 formatting, there are no footnote citations.

Footnotes are only used for interesting information that one would rather not include in the main text because it is not immediately pertinent.

Footnotes are not included in the word count.

Extra Material