Revised essay #2

Professor Tony Alessandrini

Doing a Works Cited Page

When you write an essay that involves secondary research—that is, when you are citing information that you got from books, articles, websites, or other sources—you should include a works cited page at the end of the essay. This page includes all the sources that you used for your essay. When you include a quote in the body of your essay, you should cite in such a way that your reader will be able to see where the quote originally appeared. For example, say you used a quote from Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? In the body of your essay, it would appear like this:

People tend to take prisons for granted, because “there is a reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them” (Davis 15).

Then, at the end of your essay, on your works cited page, you would include a reference to Davis’ book that looks like this: Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. So, to take this in two steps: 1) In the body of your essay, when you use a quote from any of the texts you have read, you should include a citation that includes the author’s last name and the page number that the quote came from: (Davis 15) or (Gilmore 231) or (Kelley 12) and so on. 2) At the end of the essay, you will have a separate page, with the title “Works Cited,” that includes all the texts you have used. The format for a works cited entry goes like this (remember that titles of book get underlined or put in italics—Are Prisons Obsolete?—while titles of articles get put in quotation marks—“Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”). BOOKS: Author’s last name, Author’s first name. Title. City of publication: name of publisher, date of publication. ARTICLES: Author’s last name, Author’s first name. “Title.” Title of journal/magazine/newspaper (date of publication). On your works cited page, the entries should be arranged alphabetically according to authors’ last names. So, if you had a works cited page that included all the texts we have read this semester, it would look like this (please note that unlike paragraphs, works cited entries indent the second and

following lines of each entry. Why? I don’t know, that’s just how it’s done ☺):

Works Cited

Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Kaba, Mariame. “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” New York Times (June 12, 2020). Kelley, Robin D. G. “Insecure: Policing Under Racial Capitalism.” Spectre 1.2 (Fall 2020). Kushner, Rachel. “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind.” New York

Times (April 17, 2019). Wright, Angela. “How Armed Police Officers on Campus Have Become a Ubiquitous Part of

American College Life.” Maclean’s (June 25, 2020). (If you wanted to cite the podcast and/or video interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, those would look like this): Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Dir. Kenton Card. Antipode Foundation,

2020. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition.” Intercepted Podcast (June 10, 2020). PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY OF THIS!