USING THE MLA SYSTEM OF DOCUMENTATION WHEN OFFERING IDEAS AND SUPPORTING EVIDENCE
In research paper wring, it is important to allow your own thinking to control the paper. Your thesis should be supported by evidence you have gathered from various sources. Citing sources is not just a mechanical exercise to follow a documentation style—it is an element that effects the rhetoric of your writing.
It is important to document sources for three basic reasons: 1.) to assign due credit to the author of the facts and ideas you have used in assembling your argument, 2.) to help readers understand how you have come to the conclusions you have presented, and 3.) to offer an indication as to the quality of your sources. Good documentation lends credulity to your writing, it gives readers evidence of your hard and thorough work, and it helps other researchers.
Since you are the author of your paper, remember that your thinking is the key to the paper’s success. Even when a substantial portion of the paper is based on research, you must think carefully and write clearly so that the ideas of others fit into your overall argument. The following explanations offer ways to present internal documentation of the thoughts and ideas of others in your paper. Remember, in the MLA style you must attribute credit to every idea that does not come from your own original thinking and every fact that is not common knowledge. It is possible, therefore, to have citations in or after nearly every sentence in a paragraph. For example:
In Prints as Visual Communication, William Ivins speaks of the "tyranny of the engraver’s nets of rationality" (88) and says that the "webbing of lines [was] an incident of manufacture" (168). Under Rubens’ system, all copied artwork—be it oil painting or technical drawing or sculptural copy—came out of the engraver’s shop looking very similar in style, thus the prejudice against the "mechanick" nature of engraving, which made art over in its own image (Ivins 73). Like the dot in a modern half-tone screen, the engraved line is a reductive element that has no capacity for meaning when taken by itself (Eaves, "Machine" 905). The line meant something entirely different to engravers, then, than it did to artists, and the split in line use is representative of the split in the two professions: artists created art, while engravers merely copied it.
Notice that each idea in this paragraph is cited individually. In the first sentence, the author of the paper attributes the quotations to the author and book she used in the text of her paper, which means that the parenthetical citations need only contain the page number. However, the second sentence, although it comes from the same source, needs a separate citation, which can come at the end of the sentence, since there is only one quoted portion of the sentence. Never cite a whole group of ideas at the end of a paragraph, even if they come from the same page. Each idea must be cited individually. Notice that the second to last sentence, which does not contain any quoted material, is also cited, because the author took the idea from Morris Eaves. Notice, too, that she uses a shortened form of the title in the parenthetical because, as the paper’s Works Cited page would indicate, she has cited from more than one work by this author and therefore simply his name and a page number would not suffice in attributing the idea to his work. Clearly, there is a direct relation between what you integrate into your text and the ideas of others that support your thinking.
The punctuation inside and around parenthetical citations should be consistent. In the typical MLA parenthetical citation, the author’s last name and page number are given without a comma between them. If, however, an abbreviated title is added, the parenthetical must include a comma after the author’s name and before the abbreviated title. The abbreviated title must be italicized or underlined if it is a book or placed in quotation marks if it is an article. The parenthetical citation is part of the sentence, so the period goes after the end parenthesis.
All styles of documentation have their paradoxes or situations where a rule is modified under certain conditions. The MLA rules for punctuating a longer quotation (this is called a block or extended quotation and should be used sparingly in your papers) are different from punctuating shorter parenthetical citations. Try to avoid using too many block quotations—this usually indicates the author of the paper is relying too much on his or her sources.
Between the publication of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake changed from a roman script to a pseudo-italic. There is no clear before-and-after date, and Blake used both scripts in both books; however, the italic evolved slowly, and became preferred. First, there were technical reasons for Blake’s changeover to italic:
[T]o connect letters and to give them a slant on the direction the pen is moving is actually easier than to write one letter at a time with a vertical axis while moving from right to left. Because there are fewer letter ends to coordinate, an italic script makes it easier to keep lined straight and words the same size. (Viscomi 71)
But even treating the technical reasons as a given, there seems, too, an obvious aesthetic reason for Blake’s abandonment of the roman script. As Blake’s concept of the illuminated book as an artifact progressed, he steered away from modeling it on the printed book.
Notice in the above paragraph that the quotation is indented an additional half inch on both sides and that the period is moved from after to before the parenthetical. This style is typical of a block quotation. When you use quotations in a paper, be sure to introduce the quote and set up a need in your paper for its idea. Remember to analyze the information in the quote to further guide the reader as to its relevance to your paper. It is inadvisable to end a paragraph with a quotation. Look at the way the above paragraph changes when the author adds a textual introduction of the author and text she quotes:
Between the publication of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake changed from a roman script to a pseudo-italic. There is no clear before-and-after date, and Blake used both scripts in both books; however, the italic evolved slowly, and became preferred. First, there were technical reasons for Blake’s changeover to italic. Joseph Viscomi, in Blake and the Idea of the Book explains:
[T]o connect letters and to give them a slant on the direction the pen is moving is actually easier than to write one letter at a time with a vertical axis while moving from right to left. Because there are fewer letter ends to coordinate, an italic script makes it easier to keep lined straight and words the same size. (71)
But even treating the technical reasons as a given, there seems, too, an obvious aesthetic reason for Blake’s abandonment of the roman script. As Blake’s concept of the illuminated book as an artifact progressed, he steered away from modeling it on the printed book.
In this case, the parenthetical citation contains only the page number, since the author’s name appears in the text of the paper. A good research paper incorporates others’ ideas into your original thesis. It is important that you do so by acknowledging that those ideas came from others. You can weave other people’s ideas into your papers by introducing the author, along with the author’s idea, and by setting up a need for that idea within your own thinking. Such textual introductions help a reader understand where your ideas leave off and the ideas of others begin and show how and why your research belongs in your paper. You should use signal verbs such as claims, implies, suggests, indicates, asserts, etc., to indicate that you are about to use another person’s writing in your paper. Here are some examples:
Reynolds asserted, "If it has no origin no higher, no taste can ever be formed in the manufactures; but if the higher Arts of Design flourish, these inferior ends will be answered of course" (12).
The London Tradesman, published in 1747, advises in its chapter "Of the Copper-Plate Engraver and Printer" that the line engraver’s "Judgement [need be] employed only in the Depth and Regularity of the Traces" (113).
Viscomi points out that the irregular font size forced Blake to compose his illuminated books sequentially "at least within distinct chapters or works" (71).
Note how the signal phrases direct the reader to understand how the quotations fit into the general thinking of the paper. To generate analysis after introducing and using a quote or paraphrased idea, consider how the source material affects your thesis thinking and what the readers would need to understand those effects.
Avoid plagiarism by always documenting quotes, paraphrased ideas, and factual information that is generally unknown. If you aren’t certain about documenting an idea, provide the documentation.
USING THE MLA SYSTEM OF DOCUMENTATION IS MORE THAN SIMPLY A WAY TO AVOID PLAGIARISM. MLA DOCUMENTATION SHOWS YOUR READERS HOW YOUR IDEAS ARE CREDIBLE AND ACADEMICALLY APPROPRIATE.