Answered By: Berkeley College Library
Last Updated: Jan 07, 2022     Views: 1354

MLA in-text citations consist of the author's last name followed by the page number of the material you are quoting or paraphrasing, normally in parenthesis at the end of the sentence or quote. 

The MLA in-text citation section of Berkeley CAS's MLA Citing Brochure has these three examples of In-text citations in MLA format:

  • Standard In-text citation:
    The "tone of words can be hurtful" (Tannen 175).
  • In-text citation using author’s name to introduce the material:
    Tannen has argued this point (175).
  • In-text citation using a work’s shortened title, if there is no author listed:
    "International espionage was prevalent in the 1990s in many parts of the world" ("Decade”).

In the first two examples, Tannen is the author and 175 is the page number. In the third one, there is no named author so the article title is placed first in the reference on the Works Cited page. The beginning of the title (in quotation marks) is used for the in-text citation. For many websites, there won't be a page number, so you may leave it out, as long as you use the title from the specific webpage where you got the information you are citing.
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You can find more guidance on creating proper citations in MLA format from the CAS's Writing and Citing LibGuide, or watch the brief YouTube video from Purdue's OWL below:

MLA Style: In-Text Citations (8th Ed., 2016)
https://youtu.be/eygi6ScdNNc

Gellis, Eliza. "MLA Style: In-Text Citations." YouTube, uploaded by OWLPurdue, 5 Apr. 2017, youtu.be/eygi6ScdNNc

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