EWRT1A-62: MLA citation overhead

Here's the information from the overhead that was hard to see…

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In-text citation walkthrough
using page 46-7, ¶10
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.

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” (47).

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” (47).

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 47).

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. (47).

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.”
Readings for Writers. Ed. Nick Mullins. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.
42-52. Print.

Indent lines after first.

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And here is the above info as a pdf.
And here's the other handout about the new MLA rules.