BC-OWL Resource: MLA Documentation
All information that comes from a source other than your own writing and thinking must be cited. This includes information such as facts, dates, and statistics, as well as others' writing that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized.
(More information on quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing is available at www.bridgewater.edu/WritingCenter/manual/paraphrase.htm.)
MLA citation style includes the author's last name and page number.
"Plato was concerned with the relationship between what is eternal and immutable, on the one hand, and what 'flows,' on the other" (Gaarder 82).
Note that
When the author's last name is mentioned in the text, the parenthetical citation should include only the page number.
In Sophie's World, Gaarder points out that "Plato was concerned with the relationship between what is eternal and immutable, on the one hand, and what 'flows,' on the other" (82).
(More information on quoting and citing sources is available at MLA Format.)
In MLA style, the bibliography, or list of sources used, is called "Works Cited." This title appears at the top of the bibliography page without underlining or quotation marks. The bibliography page should be double-spaced throughout. Sources are listed in alphabetical order according to author's last name. Each bibliographic listing begins at the margin of the page, with second line indented (and with third, fourth, and fifth line indented, if you need that many lines). Sample entries below illustrate the format for a book with a single author, an essay from an anthology (or book of texts by different authors), an article from a popular magazine, an article from a scholarly journal, and a Webpage. (For more sample entries-showing more than one author, a translated work, an article from a reference work, etc.-see www.bridgewater.edu/WritingCenter/manual/bibentries.htm.)
Book:
Hale, Jonathan. The Old Way of Seeing: How Architecture Lost Its Magic
(and How to Get It Back). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
Essay from Anthology:
Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Longman Anthology
of British Literature. Ed. David Damrosch and Christopher Baswell.
New York: Longman, 1999. 2447-2452.
Article from Magazine:
Lemann, Nicholas. "The Iraq Factor." The New Yorker 22 Jan. 2001: 34-38.
Article from Scholarly Journal:
Wu, Su-Yueh, and Donald L. Rubin. "Evaluating the Impact of Collectivism
and Individualism on Argumentative Writing by Chinese and North
American College Students." Research in the Teaching of English 35
(2000): 148-178.
Webpage:
Wilson, Fred L. Science and Human Values: Pre-Socratic Philosophers.
11 May 1999. 5 Feb. 2002. Physics Teacher.org.
<http://www.rit.edu/~flwstv/presocratic.html>.
Posted by A. L. Trupe Feb. 21, 2001