Documentation

Information presented must be documented.  To avoid plagiarism, give each author credit for his/her words and ideas.  For each source used, specific information needs to be organized with correct punctuation, spacing, and presented in appropriate format.  Include basic information: author or editor, title of work, and publication information. The use of plagiarism usually results in a failing grade (teachers do know the difference.)

Plagiarize as defined by Merriam-Webster: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own use (a created production) without crediting the source; to commit literary theft . . . . The word is derived from the Latin word plagiarius which means “kidnapper.”  

Parenthetical Documentation or Footnotes or End Notes

You must indicate to your readers not only what works you used in writing the paper but also exactly what you derived from each source and exactly where in the work you found the material. The most practical way to supply this information is to insert a brief parenthetical acknowledgment in your paper whenever you incorporate another’s words, facts, or ideas. Usually the author’s last name and a page reference are enough to identify the source and the specific location from which you borrowed material (MLA 204).

 Medieval Europe was a place both of  “raids, pillages, slavery, and  extortion”  
  and of “traveling merchants, monetary exchange, towns if not cities, and active markets 
  in grain” (Townsend 10).

Given the author’s last name, your reader can find complete publication information for the source in the alphabetically arranged list of works cited that follows your text.

 General Guidelines

1.    References in the text must clearly point to specific sources in the list of works cited.

2.    Identify the location of the borrowed information as specifically as possible. Give the page by numbers that apply.

3.     Keep parenthetical references as brief—and as few—as clarity and accuracy permit. Give only the information needed to identify a source.

4.     Identify sources by author and, if necessary, title; do not use abbreviations such as ed., trans., and comp. after the name.

5.     If you are citing an entire work rather than a specific part of it, the author’s name in the text may be the only documentation required.

 One or More Works by the Same Author

Put a comma after the last name of the author and add the title of the work (if brief), or a shortened version, and the relevant page reference. If you state the author’s name in the text, give only title and page(s). If you included both the author’s name and the title in the text, indicate only the pertinent page number in parenthesis.

Author’s Name in Text

      Tannen has argued this point (178-85).

Authors’ Names in Text
       
       Others, like Bush and McCain (210-15), hold the opposite point of view.

To avoid interrupting the flow of your writing, place parenthetical references where pauses would naturally occur (preferably at the end of a sentence), as near as possible to the material documented. The parenthetical reference precedes the punctuation mark that concludes the sentence, clause, or phrase containing the borrowed material.

A reference directly after a quotation follows the closing quotation mark.

In the late Renaissance, Machiavelli contended that human beings were by nature “ungrateful” and “mutable” (1240), and Montaigne thought them “miserable and puny” (1343).

Citation in a Long Quotation

If a quotation, whether poetry or prose, is set off from the text, type a space after the concluding punctuation mark and insert the parenthetical reference.

          Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” is rich in evocative detail:

It was winter. It got dark

early. The waiting room

was full of  grown-up people,

arctics and overcoats,

lamps and magazines. (6-10)

Citation of a Multivolume Work

Between the years 1945 and 1972, the political-party system in the United States underwent profound changes (Schlesinger, vol. 4).

For more information on parenthetical documentation, please consult Section 5 of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Fifth Edition.

Quotations
 Quotations are effective when used selectively. Use quotes only when they are particularly interesting, vivid, unusual and keep them as brief as possible. Over quotation can bore your readers and lead them to conclude that you’re neither an original thinker nor a skillful writer (MLA 80).

 Ellipsis (three spaced periods):  

Whenever you wish to omit a word, a phrase, a sentence, or more from a quoted passage, you should be guided by two principles: fairness to the author quoted and the grammatical integrity of your writing. A quotation should never be presented in a way that could cause a reader to misunderstand the sentence structure of the original sentence. If you quoted only a word or phrase, it will be obvious that you left out some of the original sentence. If using a longer quote, use ellipsis and place square brackets around your ellipsis points (MLA 85).

Quoting a word or phrase:          

     In his inaugural address, John F. Kennedy spoke of a “new frontier.”

Omission of more than word or phrase in longer quote:

   In surveying various responses to plagues in the Middle Ages, Barbara W. Tuchman 
    writes, “Medical thinking [. . . ] stressed air as the communicator of diseases, ignoring 
    sanitation or visible carriers.”

Quotation with an ellipsis in the middle and a parenthetical reference:

     In surveying various responses to plagues in the Middle Ages, Barbara W. Tuchman
     writes, “Medical thinking [. . . ] stressed air as the communicator of diseases, ignoring 
     sanitation or visible carriers”  (101-102).

Quotation with an ellipsis at the end:

      Barbara W. Tuchman writes, “Medical thinking, trapped in the theory of astral influences, 
      stressed air as the communicator of disease [. . . ].”

Quotation with an ellipsis at the end followed by a  parenthetical reference:

      Barbara W. Tuchman writes, “Medical thinking, trapped in the theory of astral influences,
      stressed air as the communicator of disease [. . . ]” (101-102).

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