MLA Citations Made Easy

Modern Language Association citations are where most students trip up when formatting research papers in the humanities. The formats of in-line, block, single author, multiple authors, and where to cite or not can be confusing. This guide is to help you with the most frequent forms of citations which occur in the common high school, college freshman, or undergraduate writing class. By no means should this guide be considered inclusive. This is also not a guide on how to construct a works cited page, that's a different topic entirely. ALWAYS refer to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook or the MLA website for the most current formatting preferences. Let's start with the most simple first-in-line single authors.

In-Line Single Author When Stating Authors Name in Sentence

The purpose is to develop the conclusion whether George Eliot reached her goal to create a form of realism which tried "to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind" (174).

Notice the quote is ended with a closed quotation mark, then the parenthetical citation, and then the closing punctation. The name of the author is listed as well as the book title, so all the formatter needs to do is add the page number from which the citation occurred.

This is the citation from the works cited used:

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

In-Line Single When Not Naming Author in Sentence
Let's use the same sentence as above, but this time not use the name of the author or the book.

The purpose is to develop the conclusion whether the author reached her goal to create a form of realism which tried "to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind" (Eliot 174).

To give the reader a bearing around the works cited sheet, we give the author's last name and the page number. Please notice there is not a comma between the author and page number-none are needed.

This is the citation from the works cited used:

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

In-Line with Two Works by Same Author
Let's use the same sentence as above, but this time we have a twist: two works by the same author. When this occurs, we follow the same conventions as above, but we add a short name for the title quoted. For this example, we are going to use the sentence without naming the author to give you a visual.

The purpose is to develop the conclusion whether the author reached her goal to create a form of realism which tried "to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind" (Eliot, Bede 174).

The works cited for this will look something like this:

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. London: Oxford World's Classics, 2001.

The citation allows the reader to find the cited Eliot works and from which work the citation came from.

In-Line with Two Authors
This most often occurs when paraphrasing an idea shared by two authors. Remember, paraphrasing or borrowing some one else's ideas still require MLA citation.

Yet, even with the comparisons to Texas greatness Goodbye to a River earned Graves, his intentions were not to extend the torch of Texas nature-writing and the proto-environmentalism begun by Roy Bedichek in Adventures of a Texas Naturalist nor become the regional voice of his contemporaries or Texas (Hamrick, "Interview" 51-60; Holley 127-128).

Works Cited

Hamrick, David. "An Interview with John Graves." Busby and Dixon 51-67.
Holley, Joe. "John Graves." Conversations with Texas Writers. Ed. Frances Leonard and Ramona Cearly. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. 125-131.

Notice, again, the parenthetical citation comes before the closing punctuation.

Block Quotes for Prose
When you use long quotes, which take up more than four lines of type, you do not have to use quotation marks. You set the quote off by adding an additional 1-inch tab, or indention to the text. So, the block quote will look like this.

Then on 13 June 1954, Graves asks himself:
What do I really have to say as a writer or a person? This era of suspended breathing and fright in which we live-how can you say anything worth saying about it? [...] I would like to so God-damned much to write something worth writing, and if I had the conception I am now competent enough with words to do it. But the conception is hard to come by. (Myself 138-139)

There are a few things at work here you need to take note of:
1. The intro tag has the normal 1-inch lefthand margin.
2. The block quote begins two inches in, but maintains its 1-inch righthand margin.
3. The block quote ends with the hard stop of normal punctuation, and the parenthetical citation is outside of the end-stop.

Block Quotes for Poetry
The same standards as above hold true for poetry verse, too. Here, however, instead of the four lines requiring a block quote in prose, in verse you use the block quote when you have more than three typed lines. When quoting verse, make sure to adhere to the line breaks in the original

The Little Details
When working with citations and quotes, too, a few other things raise there heads. What if you want to change a word in a direct quote to match the tense of your sentence? Easy enough.

You can change the quote if you mark your changed word in brackets. For example:

The Goodbye to a River journey's intention was an attempt to recapture the Brazos River of Graves's childhood when he hunted blue quail and ducks in the Brazos's eddies, where he fished for bass and ran trot-lines for blue and channel cats, and "where even first bottles of beer, bitter, [were] drunk with two bawdy ranchers' daughters [he] and Hale ran across once, fishing..." (Goodbye 7).

In the original quote, the [were] was the word was, and the [he] was I. The author changed the words to fit in with the context of the lead in material. There are no problem changing words to fit tense and structure-you cannot change words that will significantly alter the reading of the sentence, though. When you change words, always use brackets [change].

You can also use an ellipsis ... to take out sections of a sentence which don't work for your quote. With postmodernism, though, where authors employ ellipses liberally, to avoid confusion, the new standard is to enclose your ellipses in brackets [...] and leave original ellipses in the quote naked ... .

These are enough tools to get you moving in the right way. Use them as a quick reference, but remember nothing take credence over the conventions ruled by the MLA Handbook.