The core of an MLA citation is the author of the source. That person’s last name links your use of the source in your paper with its full description in your list of works cited. The most common addition to this name is a specific location, usually a page number, identifying where the material appears in the original source, such as (Valero 231). This basic form applies whatever the type of source—article, book, or Web page.

As you check your MLA style, keep in mind these three questions:

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Who Wrote It?

Individual Author Not Named in Sentence

Place the author’s last name in parentheses, right after the source information, to keep readers focused on the sequence and content of your sentences.

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Individual Author Named in Sentence

Name the author in your sentence, perhaps with credentials or experience noted, to capitalize on the persuasive value of the author’s “expert” status.

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Two Authors

Include each author’s last name either in your sentence or in parentheses.

Ferriter and Toibin note Irish historical objectivity about the famine (5).

Irish historians tend to report the famine dispassionately (Ferriter and Toibin 5).

Three or More Authors

Name all the authors, or follow the first with “et al.” (the Latin abbreviation for “and others”). Identify the source the same way in your list of works cited.

Between 1870 and 1900, cities grew at an astonishing rate (Roark et al. 671).

Organization Author

If a source is sponsored by a corporation, a professional society, or another group, name the sponsor as the author if no one else is specified.

Each year, the Kids Count program (Annie E. Casey Foundation) alerts children’s advocates about the status of children in their state.

Author of an Essay from a Reader or Collection

Suppose you consulted Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” in a collection edited by Wendy Martin. You’d cite Tan as the author, not Martin, and begin your Works Cited entry with Tan’s name.

Tan explains the “Englishes” of her childhood and family (32).

Unidentified Author

For a source with an unknown author, supply the complete title in your sentence or the first main word or two of the title in parentheses.

Due to download codes and vinyl’s beauty, album sales are up (“Back to Black” 1).

Same Author with Multiple Works

If you are citing several works by the same author, the author’s name alone won’t identify which work you mean. Add the full title, or identify it with a few key words. For example, you would cite two books by Bill McKibben, Deep Economy and Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, as follows.

McKibben cites advocates of consistent economic expansion (Deep Economy 10) yet calls growth “the one big habit we finally must break” (Eaarth 48).

Different Authors of Multiple Works

Separate more than one source in parentheses with a semicolon. For easy reading, favor shorter, separate references, not long strings of sources.

Ray Charles and Quincy Jones worked together for many years and maintained a strong friendship throughout Charles’s life (Jones 58-59; Lydon 386).

What Type of Source Is It?

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Because naming the author is the core of a citation, the basic form applies to any type of source. Even so, a few types of sources may present complications.

Multivolume Work

Add both volume and page numbers, with a colon between.

Indirect Source

If possible, find the original source. If you can’t access it, add “qtd. in” to show that the material was “quoted in” the source you cite.

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Visual Material

When you include a visual, help your reader connect it to your text. In your discussion, identify the artist or the artwork, and refer to its figure number.

Johnson’s 1870 painting Life in the South is a sentimental depiction of African Americans after the Civil War (see fig. 1).

Below the visual, supply a figure number and title, including the source.

Fig. 1. Eastman Johnson, Life in the South, High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

How Are You Capturing the Source Material?

How you capture source material—in your words or in a short or long quotation—affects how you credit it. Always set off the source’s words using quotation marks or the indented form for a long “block” quotation.

If material, quoted or not, comes from a specific place in a source, add a page number or other location, such as the section number supplied in an electronic source or the chapter or line in a literary work. No page number is needed for general material (an overall theme or concept) or a source without page numbers (a Web site, film, recording, performance).

Overall Summary or Important Idea

Terrill’s Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment takes a fresh look at the rhetorical power and strategies of Malcolm X’s speeches.

Specific Summary or Paraphrase

One analysis of Malcolm X’s 1964 speech “The Ballot or the Bullet” concludes that it exhorts listeners to the radical action of changing vantage point (Terrill 129-31).

If you paraphrase or summarize a one-page article, no page number is needed because it will appear in your Works Cited list.

Vacuum-tube audio equipment is making a comeback, with aficionados praising the warmth and glow from the tubes, as well as the sound (Patton).

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Blended Paraphrase and Quotation

When your words are blended with those of your source, clearly distinguish the two. Use quotation marks to set apart the words of your source.

To avoid generalizing about “people-with-dementia” (Pearce xxii), the author simply uses names.

Brief Quotation with Formal Launch Statement

Vecsey states his claim for baseball: “No other sport has this endurance” (6).

Brief Quotation Integrated in Sentence

“No other sport” (6), according to Vecsey’s Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, requires players to tolerate double- or tripleheaders.

Double- and tripleheaders require more stamina than any “other sport” (Vecsey 6).

Only baseball, according to Vecsey, “has this endurance” (6).

Long Quotation

When a quotation is longer than four typed lines, double-space and indent the entire quotation one-half inch instead of using quotation marks. If it is one paragraph or less, begin its first line without extra paragraph indentation. Use ellipsis marks ( . . . ) to show any omission from the middle.

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Quotation from a Sacred Text

Instead of the page, note the version, book, chapter, and verse numbers.

Once again, the author alludes to the same passage: “What He has seen and heard, of that He testifies” (New American Bible, John 3.32).

Quotation from a Novel or Short Story

First note the page number in your own copy. If possible, add the section or chapter where the passage could be found in any edition.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens describes Stryver as “shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations” (110; bk. 2, ch. 4).

Quotation from a Play

For a verse play, list the act, scene, and line numbers, divided by periods.

Love, Iago says, “is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will” (Othello 1.3.326).

Quotation from a Poem

Add a slash to show where a new line begins. Use “line” or “lines” in the first reference but only numbers in subsequent references, as in these examples from William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us.” The first reference:

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The next reference:

Separate part and line numbers by a period, without the word “line.”

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In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth ponders the truths of human existence, “Which we are toiling all our lives to find, / In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave” (8.116-17).