In-Text Citations
By the guidelines of academic integrity and academic honesty, in college projects you must provide credit for the source of any idea you include which you read, saw, or heard somewhere else. Doing so is called providing an in-text citation.
MLA style asks for author-page as the in-text citation, often placed within parentheses after you have quoted or paraphrased information that you borrowed from another source.
To quote a source...
- Copy the source word-for-word without changing anything. Put everything you copied inside quotation marks. At the end of the quote, add the in-text citation: the last name of the author for that source and the page number where you found it (if available).
(From Williams College's Tips on Quoting)
To paraphrase a source...
- Restate the source, in your own words. No special punctuation is needed. At the end of the paraphrase, add the in-text citation: the last name of the author for that source and the page number where you found it (if available).
(From Williams College's Tips on Paraphrasing)
Whether you quoted something or paraphrased it, you must include an in-text citation, and then you must give the full citation for that source at the end of the project in the list of Works Cited.
Practice!
On the first page of your handout, you have part of an essay written by a student who forgot to cite her sources.
The student used information from these two sources:
- A magazine article (p. 76)
Create the in-text citations as directed.