MLA Style is the preferred style for most English assignments at Saint Mary's.
Additional Resources:
The general format for an in-text citation in MLA style is:
(Diaz 54) <-- "54" is the page number or the line number in a poem
Example:
Each of these texts offers a lesson on how "it is only human to make mistakes" (Thucydides 23).
However, if you mention the author's name earlier in your writing, you don't need to mention it again in parentheses.
Examples:
Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale is told from the perspective of... For example, when she stalls, "'Wait...my tale is not begun / no, you'll drink from another barrel / before I am through..." (169-171), she is showing... [since you mentioned Chaucer earlier, you don't need to put the name in parentheses; note the slashes that indicate line breaks in poetry/verse]
Lucretius's striking observation in On the Nature of the Universe that "nature repairs one thing from another" (43) reflects this knowledge that...
The older son complains that despite his years of loyalty and hard work, his father "never gave [him] even a young goat to feast on with [his] friends" (New Jerusalem Bible, Luke 10.30-31). [the Bible gets cited differently than other kinds of works]
The general format for a citation in MLA style for an excerpt in an anthology is:
Authorlastname, Authorfirstname. Excerpt from "Short Work." [or: Excerpt from Long Work.] [Optional: Translated by Translatorfirstname Translatorlastname, original publication year.] Title of Reader, Publisher, Publication Year, pp. [first and last pages of the text in the reader].
Examples:
Mandela, Nelson. Excerpt from "I Am Prepared to Die." The Global Conversation of the 20th and 21st Centuries, XanEdu, 2015, pp. 206-210.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Excerpt from The Social Contract. Translated by Maurice Cranston, 1968. Western Tradition II, XanEdu, 2014, pp. 130-44.
New American Bible. Western Tradition I, 3rd ed., XanEdu, 2017, pp. 93-97.
*Don't forget to create a hanging indent so that the first line is flush left and every subsequent line is indented 1/2 inch.
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