English 102

Notes for Internal Citations, MLA Style

The core of scholarly writing is the use of source material to support your arguments and opinions on a subject. The basic structure of a scholarly essay should follow that pattern of argument (from you) and evidence (from your sources.) This is something I discuss in more detail in the handout on organizing your essay. In this document, we’ll talk a little about how you actually integrate that source material into your essay.

There are two basic ways that you can utilize sources in an academic essay. For both of these ways, you must cite where that information came from according to MLA style. Please note: failing to cite your sources both internally and on your Works Cited is plagiarism. You absolutely must cite your sources in both places each time you use a source.

Paraphrase

The first way that you can use information from a source is paraphrasing. Essentially, paraphrasing is writing information from a source in your own words during the course of an essay. You must cite this information after using it. An example of a paraphrase is:

Original source, “In the Spirit of the Game” by Willie Morris.

He was paralyzed from the neck down. The injury was serious, with little likelihood that he would ever recover. The attending doctors would call it one of the most drastic injuries they had ever seen, likening the impact that crushed his back to the crushing of an empty can.

Paraphrase: Mullins was injured severely. Doctors were shocked by the extent of the damage to his back, and doubted that he would recover (Morris 331).

Notice that this paraphrase is a complete rewording of the source material. Simply replacing each word with a synonym is not sufficient for a paraphrase. At the end of the paraphrase, before the period and in parentheses, should be the author’s name and the page number that the information came from. This is the basic citation method for MLA style.

Sometimes, you’ll encounter sources that don’t provide you with that basic information (no author and/or no page numbers). When you encounter that, you should touch base with me (or check Purdue/OWL) for help with citing that particular source.

The vast majority of your source material in your essay should be paraphrased. Use paraphrasing as your go-to method of integrating your sources into the essay.

If you have a series of sentences in one paragraph that are all paraphrased and all come from the same source, you do not need to cite after each one so long as they come back to back. If you have any interruptions (your own thoughts, another source, a quote, etc.) you must cite before and after these interruptions. If you reach the end of a paragraph, you must cite the source before starting a new paragraph, even if the new paragraph continues to use material from that same source.

Quotations

You can directly quote from any source during the course of your essay. You should try to do this chiefly when you cannot paraphrase (because of technical jargon or use of numbers/statistics) or if a particular phrase seems vital and important to your essay (such as showing the actual wording of a particular law so that the reader can understand the meaning of the law). Be careful not to overuse quotations. They should be used occasionally to augment your argument and the paraphrased material.

One important thing to note: unlike with paraphrased material, when you are directly quoting, you must cite immediately after the quote. Even if you use more information from that author later in the paragraph, with a direct quote you cannot wait to cite your source. Every direct quote must be accompanied by a citation no matter what.

There are several types of direct quotations that you can use.

Full Sentence Quotations

This is where you use a full sentence from a source. Note that I’m introducing the sentence with a tagline, giving attribution to the author of the source. No direct quote can ever stand on its own. It must always be accompanied by either a tagline (as in this example) or some paraphrased material (as in the Partial Sentence Quotation example below).

According to Willie Morris, “The mood of the university, the town, and the state in the following days was of grief and sadness” (331).

Note that in the citation, I’ve only listed the page number. That is because when you use the author’s last name in the sentence, you don’t have to repeat it in the citation. That being said, if I reverted to paraphrasing material from the author after this quote, I would need to go back to using his last name in the citation for that paraphrased material.

Partial Sentence Quotations

If you want or need to paraphrase part of a sentence and quote another part, you can do that so long as your sentence makes logical and grammatical sense.

Doctors said that the injury was, “one of the most drastic…they had ever seen” (Morris 331).

Note that with this partial sentence quotation, I used the author’s last name in the citation. That’s because I didn’t use his name in a tagline.

Block Quotations

Anytime a direct quote fills more than three full lines of typed text (from margin to margin), it must be set up as a block quote. With a block quote, you’ll begin your tagline in the paragraph like normal. After the tagline, put a colon and enter down to the next line. The entire quote will be tabbed over, with the citation at the end. Note that with a block quote, you won’t use quotation marks and you will put the end-of-sentence punctuation before the citation. Once your quote ends and you’ve cited it, hit enter and begin your paragraph again on the next line.

Morris writes:

Yet life often does not work that way. A great sporting event indeed emulates life, its ecstasies and sorrows, its gallantries and failures, and its time running out in Dixie autumn twilights for all of us who wish life to give us feeling and victory and hope against old mortality. (332)

Indirect Quotations

Anytime that you directly quote something that was presented as a quotation in a source, you must set it up as an indirect quote. In the example below, I’m presenting a quote from a football coach named Billy Brewer. I found this quote in a source written by Willie Morris. Because the words in the quote were spoken by someone other than the author of the source, it is an indirect quote.

According to Billy Brewer, “He was lanky, always clapping, having fun, what we call a ‘glue’ player, not that fast or big, but the kind that holds a team together” (qtd. in Morris 331).

Note that the indirect quote I used the tagline to give attribution to the person who actually said/wrote the quote. In the citation, I put “qtd. in” and the name of the author who wrote the source where I found the quote.