EWRT1A-24: MLA walk-through

Here's the overhead I was trying (and failing) to use.

MLA in-text citation walk-through

Using ¶10, pages 48-49:

“In a sense, creating an English Self is a way of reconciling my old cultural
values with the new values required by English writing, without losing the former.”

How do I incorporate this sentence into my paper?

Direct quotation.

Start with a signal phrase:

Fan Shen states that…

Put borrowed words into quotation marks:

Fan Shen states that “creating an English Self is a way of reconciling [his] old cultural values with the new values required by English writing.”

Double check to make sure you quoted correctly. Put brackets around changed words. Only use ellipses (…) when removing words in middle of quotation, not at the beginning or end.

Put page number in parentheses after the quotation:

Fan Shen states that “creating an English Self is a way of reconciling [his] old cultural values with the new values required by English writing” (49).

Notice that you don’t need a “p.” before the number and the period comes after the parentheses.

The same applies for partial quotations:

Just as Fan Shen experienced, I had to reconcile “my old cultural values with the new values required by English writing” (49).

If you don’t use a signal phrase, put author (if no author, put title) before page number:

“Creating an English Self is a way of reconciling [his] old cultural values with the new values required by English writing” (Shen 49).

Paraphrases work the same way. Again, start with a signal phrase:

Fan Shen observes…

Then put the idea into your own words:

Fan Shen observes that students from different cultural backgrounds have to make a new identity to succeed in writing classes in the U.S. (49).

Make sure that when putting the idea into your own words that you do so completely and don’t misinterpret the author’s idea. Also, don’t forget the page number.

Works cited.

Obviously, providing page numbers only makes sense if the reader is told what books the pages are from. This is what the works cited page does. Since you provided a signal phrase that contains the author’s name, the works cited page is organized alphabetically by the name of the author.

Shen, Fan. “The Classroom and the Wider Culture: Identity as a Key to Learning English Composition.” EWRT1A Reader. Ed. Nick Mullins. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010. 44-54. Print.

Indent lines after first (the above lacks the correct formatting because of web limitations).

Usually a works cited page needs to be on a separate sheet of paper, but for this class you can simply put it at the end of your essay.

Here's a pdf of the above info.