Hi! I'm Professor Hitch, and today, I'm going
to tell you how to create in-text citations.
To do this, I have brought up a works cited page that we will be working with
momentarily. But, before we get started, I want to tell
you the basic rule that we're going to be following:
"MLA works on a name number format; each in-text citation, also known as a
parenthetical citation, includes a name, often the last name of
the author, and includes a number, often the page
number." Um, but neither is true all the time, and
i suspect that's why a lot of students have tremendous difficulty creating
in-text citations. Without further ado though, I'm going to
show you the name number format in action by commenting on this
works cited page. So, if you look at this first citation, it
says Dean comma Cornelia. That is the source with a
single author. And, as I read a little bit into this, I
see it's from the New York Times. It's from New York Times website.
Based on the information provided to me here,
my in-text citation would be dean and I might leave it at that. I might
actually simply only write dean and leave out the number.
Hypothetically, if this is on the new york times, there
may be a page number hiding somewhere on that website. However,
I'm basing these in-text citations off the information that I have available to
me in the works cited. Therefore, dean.
That's it. For this next citation. we're looking at something
very similar. Single author. So, Ebert,
nope, should be capitalized, and its a website
which means although there may be a page number hiding somewhere on there, I don't
have that information and therefore this would be the appropriate in-text
citation. This next one though is tricky is
shaking things up a little bit. We still have a single author, John Gowdy.
However, if you look at the bottom here, pp 27-36,
that means those were the pages referenced for this essay.
I'm going to highlight this,
My in-text citation would be Gawdy, and I'm going to pretend
I'm citing from page 28. (Gowdy 28). Some students make the mistake of adding
a pp, or a pg,
or sometimes, they mistakenly add a comma. These things are all wrong.
It is the name number format, not the name comma number format.
The next citation is a little more complicated still. We don't have
page numbers, but now we have two authors. How to navigate that situation?
For my in-text citation, I will put them in the order that I see them
in the works cited page. So, I'm going to start with Harris
and Revkin.
This next one is pretty interesting. This one does not have
an author or a page number. This is exactly the kind of citation that i
think a lot of students would get messed up on.
When your source does not have an author, you would need to cite
the title. So, I'm going to say, "An Inconvenient
Truth", which I don't think I spelled correctly.
Nope, a lot more letters in there. Okay, I'm going to leave it here but with
a couple extra things to add.
Thing number one when you're citing a title,
make sure your formatting matches the formatting in the works cited page.
This "An Inconvenient Truth" is italicized. Therefore,
I should italicize this now. You might be wondering why I left off
the page number? Did I do that for the same reason that I did for Dean,
Ebert, and Harrison Revkin? My answer is actually no.
So, let's pretend for a moment that we were referencing minute 15
to minute 15 and 30 seconds in the movie, a 30
second clip. You would actually use those numbers,
like, so, um, depending on how much of a stickler you want to be about it,
technically movies happen most of the time in hours instead of
minutes, so you might make it a very long time
stamp, but this is how you would cite any video
source with a time stamp and either the title or author.
At this point, I hope that you can start to see a pattern
emerging your in-text citation. Should start with a name
yes, but that name should always be the first thing
that the reader is going to see on the works cited page.
Dean matches up with dean. Ebert with Ebert.
Gowdy with Gowdy. Harris with Harris. and with "An" and "an inconvenient..."
Anyway, this pattern is important. When in doubt, when you're
not sure what name should go where, pick the
name that's closest to the front of your citation.
I'm going to skip Marcel Leroux because that seems like a source that we've
already tackled. Instead, I'm going to go down to Milken
Michael Milken et al. This is going to have a very
interesting in-text citation. So, we'd start with his last name Milken,
but we wouldn't go to number just yet, and you will notice there is a
p 63 page 63. we would do Milken et
al period 63. The reason why that at all is
important is because it actually stands for something.
Et al. is latin for "and others" and it signifies that there were
at least three, maybe more, authors in this source. When you quote Milken,
but you leave out the et al., you write Milken 63, you are falsely claiming that
Milken was the only author. Not only do his co-authors suddenly feel
very sad that their contributions are not recognized,
but that is a mild, although very much real, form of plagiarism.
You're misrepresenting a source.
Uh, we'll do this citation very quickly: Nordhaus
31-34. Let's say that we had like a very long quote maybe there were some
ellipses in the quote to make it shorter. If you're citing more than one page, you
do that by using a small hyphen
31 to 34.
Now, reading ahead here, I see that I've actually messed this up. Darn,
I'm gonna keep recording though because i think it's important to show you that
even the pros can get things wrong sometimes.
You will notice this next source doesn't have an author. It only has
a dash dash dash. What's that about? Well, in a works cited page, when you have a
dash dash dash that means that you're actually
repeating the author. That means that William Nordhaus wrote this
as well. When you have two sources written by the same author
instead of using their name and confusing people
who will not know which source you're referring to,
you use the title.
"After Kyoto: Alternative Mechanisms to Control
Global Warming."
Yikes! That's long though, isn't it? Fun fact! When you're citing a long
title, you actually should shorten it up a bit. So you might write
"After Kyoto..." or "After Kyoto: Alternative Mechanisms..."
Like that.
Next page, we're looking at pretty normal sources, pretty normal sources,
and it seems like we're done! I hope this has been a helpful review of
how to create in-text citations.
Please remember when you're creating in-text citations, when in doubt
use the first word of your citation or in the case of our Nord
haus sources, use the first original word,
"After Kyoto...."
[cuts off unexpectedly]