You're writing your paper, you're using sources to support your points. So far so good.
Plagiarism? Ha! TurnitIn? barely an inconvenience. But now it's time for citations. MLA style.
And you know how teachers can be about citations. One errant comma and poof, there goes 10 points.
Well, here's the good news. MLA is easy stuff. And I'm going to show you just how easy right now.
Let's say you've written the following in your mla essay about Mark Twain. Now you're going to quote a source to support your point.
"Twain's class fiction consists only of absurd aristocrats and a large population of sheep," citation Roth 33.
Outstanding. You've quoted from a source and then cited that quotation
with an in text citation that refers to the full reference citation on your Works Cited page.
As you can see, an MLA an in-text citation consists only of the author's last name plus a locator.
Okay, what the duece is a locator? It's MLA's term for page number, line number, section number, chapter number, or timestamp.
If your source doesn't have one of those numbers, don't put anything as a locator.
Next point. The only time you use a locator is when you're either quoting directly from a source
or paraphrasing a specific passage.
Now let's define the two types of in text citation. There's the parenthetical citation, and the narrative citation also called the prose citation.
Let's take a look. The first as we said is a parenthetical citation,
where as the name suggests, the author's name is inside parentheses, Roth, author's name inside parentheses,
then the page number. But what if you paraphrase Roth, instead of quoting him?
Look at this paraphrase. "Marty Roth asserts that in Twain's world most people are caricatures of aristocrats and the clueless" 33.
When the author's name is a functional part of the sentence, the author's name does not go inside the parentheses,
and that's called a narrative or prose citation. Now, you can use either type of in text citation, either a parenthetical citation,
or a narrative or prose citation, where the author's name is a functional part of your sentence.
Now that you've got those basics down, all we need to do is add a few variations that you will encounter.
First variation--two authors. In the parenthetical citation, both authors are listed with an and in between them.
And a narrative citation-- Same thing. Both authors are listed, and they're joined by and.
When you have three or more authors, only use the first author's name. Here you see it in a parenthetical. citation,
Roth et al., and et al. means "and others." And there's the narrative citation, Roth and colleagues.
You could also say, Roth and co authors, etc. The next is when you have the organization that is the author,
and that includes companies or corporations. you simply list the name of the organization. Here we have Twain Society.
And in the narrative citation, you do the same thing except outside the parentheses.
When you have no author listed, you use the title of the source while maintaining its punctuation from the Works Cited page.
Here we have the title of the source, "Conquest of English" and that is an article title so it's in quote marks.
And then you repeat that in the narrative citation, except it is not inside the parentheses.
Okay, thanks for watching. If this video helped, please be sure to hit the like button, that really helps.
Also in the meantime, be sure to download this free document that lists all of the formats that were covered in this video.
And also be sure to check out this MLA playlist for the other videos that you will need for formatting and also your work cited citations.
Talk to you later.