MLA Parenthetical Citation Within the Text

Avoiding Plagiarism

The following are a few examples of parenthetical citation formats to use within the text of your paper. For more detailed information, consult the MLA Handbook. 

Citing situation	Examples
When you do NOT mention the author's name in your sentence, the Author's name and page number are placed in parentheses at the end of your sentence.	One researcher has found that dreams move backward in time as the night progresses (Dement 71).
When you mention the author's name in your sentence, the page number is placed in parentheses at the end of the sentence.	Freud states that "a dream is the fulfillment of a wish" (154).
When you cite more than one work by the same author:	One current theory emphasizes the principle that dreams express "profound aspects of personality" (Foulkes, "Sleep" 184). But investigation shows that young children's dreams are "rather simple and unemotional" (Foulkes, "Dreams" 78).
When the work has two or three authors:	Psychologists hold that no two children are alike (Gesell and Ilg 68).
When the work has more than three authors, use the Latin term "et al" which means "and others" after the first author's last name.	(Rosenberg et al. 14)
When the work has NO AUTHOR, begin with the first few words of the citation as it will appear alphabetized in your Work Cited page at the end of your paper.	Random testing for use of steroids by athletes is facing strong opposition by owners of several of these teams ("Steroids" 22).
When you quote or paraphrase a quotation from a book or article that appeared somewhere else:	Bacon observed that "it is hardly possible at once to admire an author and to go beyond him" (qtd. in Guibroy 113).
When you cite a personal interview:	"Drinking milk made me a better person," stated the artist (Vanilli). (Note: If you mention the name of your interview subject in your text, no paren-thetical citation is necessary.)
When you are citing several sources for a single passage:	There are negative implications to computerizing commercial art (Parker 2; "Art Nonsense" 43).
When you cite a literary work:	Chai explains, "I reached out and smoothed out the frown lines on his forehead" (105; Ch. 4).
When you cite a long quotation (five lines or more) that is set off from the text:	No one is really certain about the origins of the term "Dust Bowl": H.L. Mencken in a footnote to the first supplement (1945) to his moumental The American Language traces the term...to an Associated Press dispatch sent by staff writer Robert Geiger on April 15, 1935. (French, Companion 3)
When you paraphrase a whole passage or several passages, begin your citation with the author's or article's name and end it with the page number:	According to Brown, every time you read an essay, you are preparing to write one. Therefore, you should pay careful attention to content and form (9).

• Corporate authors are spelled out each time, although a familiar acronym may be used the second and subsequent times. (National Aeronautical Space Administration, 1998), followed in later citations as (NASA, 1967).
• If authors of different items have the same surname, use their first name initial to distinguish.

A Statement on Plagiarism

Using someone else's ideas or phrasing and representing those ideas or phrasing as our own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is a serious offense known as plagiarism. "Ideas or phrasing" includes written or spoken material, of course – from whole papers and paragraphs to sentences, and, indeed, phrases – but it also includes statistics, lab results, art work, etc. "Someone else" can mean a professional source, such as a published writer or critic in a book, magazine, encyclopedia, or journal; an electronic resource such as material we discover on the World Wide Web; another student at our school or anywhere else; a paper-writing "service" (online or otherwise) which offers to sell written papers for a fee.

Let us suppose, for example, that we're doing a paper for Music Appreciation on the child prodigy years of the composer and pianist Franz Liszt and that we've read about the development of the young artist in several sources. In Alan Walker's book Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years (Ithaca: 1983), we read that Liszt's father encouraged him, at age six, to play the piano from memory, to sight-read music and, above all, to improvise. We can report in our paper (and in our own words) that Liszt was probably the most gifted of the child prodigies making their mark in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century – because that is the kind of information we could have gotten from a number of sources; it has become what we call common knowledge.

However, if we report on the boy's father's role in the prodigy's development, we should give proper credit to Alan Walker. We could write, for instance, the following: Franz Liszt's father encouraged him, as early as age six, to practice skills which later served him as an internationally recognized prodigy (Walker 59). Or, we could write something like this: Alan Walker notes that, under the tutelage of his father, Franz Liszt began work in earnest on his piano playing at the age of six (59). Not to give Walker credit for this important information is plagiarism.