Your paper will consist of a mix of your ideas and the ideas of others. You put the ideas of other people in your essay in one of two ways. By quoting, which means that you copy words from somebody else. Or by paraphrasing, which means you write their ideas in your own words.
Citing Research
A quote and a paraphrase require you to write (or cite) the author you took the information from. Citing research is no more than naming the author and page number of the research you quoted or paraphrased. We have two ways to do this. We can either put the author's name and the year of publication in brackets after the sentence.
Kangaroos can jump to a remarkable height of 3 meters (Turner, 3).
Or we can put the author's name first. We do this by introducing the author's name in the text and then writing the page number in brackets before the sentence.
According to Turner (3) kangaroos can jump to a remarkable height of 3 meters.
Use both of these in-text citation styles for a professional-looking paper.
Et Al.
If your source was written by three or more authors only write the first author's name followed by the words ‘et al.’. ‘Et al.’ means ‘and others’ in Latin.
Frustrations occur because instructors do not have the skills to predict and troubleshoot technical issues before they arise (Groff et al., 9).
Qtd. In
Sometimes you may need to cite to a source within a source. For example, you are reading a book by Pinker and he cites information from the author Torres. In your paper, you cite the original author (Torres) followed by ‘qtd. in’ and then the author and page number of the source you are reading.
“Bi-lingual speakers often code switch unconsciously” (Torres 7, qtd. in Pinker 18).
In your works cited list only include the details for the book you read.
Works Cited
Finally, your Works Cited list (references) goes on a new page at the end of your paper. Here you write the full details of all of the sources you used in your paper.
Works Cited are written slightly differently depending on if they are published in a journal, book, webpage, newspaper, or other source. Grab the green MLA handout at the library entrance to help with constructing your works cited list.
MLA 9 has strict rules for how your paper should look. This includes the look of your title information, the font you use, heading styles, and the spacing and indenting of each paragraph.
See here for a sample MLA 9 formatted paper (MLA.org).