Documentation
Research Writing
Miss Wascavich
Parenthetical Citations: Internal Documentation
We have been giving credit to our sources through our works cited
list. However, you are also required, according to MLA, to give credit while
you write. This is called internal documentation, and we use parenthetical
citations to accomplish this. Whenever you insert a parenthetical citation
(a.k.a. give credit), you have two things to decide:
 Where to place the citation
 What information belongs inside the parentheses
You need to give credit every time you use a source in the form of a
paraphrase,
summary, or direct quotation. You will want to document accurately any
words or ideas you have borrowed, but it is not necessary to document
common knowledge or every single sentence. Try not to overload your
paper with citations.
Where to place the citation
Here are some rules governing the placement and punctuation of
citations:
 Place a citation at a natural pause—at the end of a sentence, or
after a phrase or clause.
o In fact, “the fate of man hinges on the willingness
to communicate” (“Showdown”).
 Place a citation at the end of a text sentence before the end
punctuation mark.
o Fearing nuclear attack, people descended on
supermarkets for canned foods, water, candles, and
batteries (Grunwald).
 If a citation follows a quotation at the end of a sentence, place the
citation after the final quotation marks and before the sentence’s
end punctuation.
o “I’ll not vote for him,” a New York salesman
commented after the blockade was announced,
“but I’ll support him. His reaction was long
overdue” (Robertson).
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 A citation in the middle of a sentence comes before a comma, a
colon, or a semi-colon.
o “A full-scale blockade generally has been
interpreted as an act of war,” the Miami Herald
reported (“Blockade”), and everyone feared
what might happen.
 Quotes: if you have a quote that is more than 4 typed lines, it
needs to be set off from the rest of the text. You do this by putting
the quote on its own line, and tabbing in twice. The citation for an
off-set quote is also different than it would be for a quote that
flows in with the rest of the text.
o For an off-set quote, you will place the citation on
the last line of the quote following the end
punctuation mark. This format will be followed
for both prose and poetry.
Finkelstein notes that there were secret government plans:
At the White House, plans were finalized for an
evacuation of key governmental personnel and
their families if Washington came under nuclear
attack. Special passes were distributed and an
assembly area was designated at the Reno
Reservoir in northwest Washington, where a
motorcade would be formed. (Smith 85)
What Information Belongs Inside the Parentheses
The form of the citation varies depending on the source. Use the
following guidelines for the following sources.
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Source with One Author (books, magazine articles, etc.)
 Enclose in parentheses the author’s last name and the page
number where the information came from. Do not use any
punctuation between the name and page number. Write the
page number only. Do not use the word page or pages or the
abbreviation p or pp.
 The Soviets call it the Caribbean Crisis; the Cubans call
it the October Crisis; to the rest of the world it is the
Cuban Missile Crisis (Finkelstein 103-04).
 If the author’s name appears in the text, write only the page
number in parentheses.
 Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and attorney
general, revealed in his documentary that the withdrawal
had been verified with the help of the UN and aerial
photographs (113).
(Robert Kennedy is the author of the documentary)
 Note: There is no set rule about when to include the
author’s name in a text sentence and when to refer to it
only in the parenthetical citation. Either way is
acceptable. Write what seems natural to you. Your goal
is simply to identify clearly the source of the quotation or
paraphrase.
 If you refer to a complete work, omit the page numbers.
 In 1990, almost thirty years after the crisis, the
Government released a whole series of documents
directly related to the Cuban Missile Crisis (National
Security Archives).
More than One work by an Author
If you are going to be using more than one source by the same person,
you will need to distinguish for your readers the specific source being used
at different points in your paper. If you only place the last name in
parentheses as stated above, then the reader won’t know which source on the
works cited list you are referring to. Therefore, you need to provide another
piece of information from the documentation on the works cited page to
clarify.
 Follow the style shown in the following example:
 Our first glimpse of the “metallic” Miss Murdstone
makes us fear for the young David (Dickens, David
Copperfield ch. 4).
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 “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever
done,” says Sydney Carton (Dickens, A Tale of Two
Cities ch. 40).
 It seems that abortion is a controversy that people
struggle with on a daily basis; on one hand, it seems
wrong to end a life that has yet to begin, yet on the
other, is it right to demand a woman who was raped to
give birth to the product of the crime (Samuels,
“Abortion: Moral Struggle” 22)?
Two or More Authors of a Source
 If there are two authors, cite both authors’ last names.
 The fact that a crisis can actually have beneficial effects
or can be the means for reaching a new understanding
is often overlooked in international politics (Stevens
and Thompson 129).
 If there are three or more authors, either cite every author’s
last name or use the first author’s last name followed by et al.
(“and others”). Use the same style (authors’ names or et al.) in
your Works Cited List.
 In philosopher Karl Popper’s “open society,”
everyone is free to criticize Government without fear
of punishment. It is the opposite of a totalitarian
society (Bullock, Stallybrass, and Trombley 608).
 In philosopher Karl Popper’s “open society,”
everyone is free to criticize Government without fear
of punishment. It is the opposite of a totalitarian
society (Bullock et al. 608).
No Author is given
 If no author is given, use the title of the source instead. You
may shorten the title, so long as it is clear which source you are
discussing. The reader should be able to look at the
parenthetical citation and match it to a source on your works
cited list.
 Remember to underline titles of books, and put titles of articles
in quotation marks (“ … “)
 Newsweek summed it up: “Mr. Kennedy’s behavior
during the past two weeks has given Americans a
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sense of deep confidence in the temper of their
President” (“Lessons in Politics” 25).
Two or more works in a single citation
 If you combine information from two different sources in your
paraphrase or summary, you can give credit to both sources in
the same citation. You need to separate the citations with a
semicolon.
 Thirty years later, reporters interviewed and wrote
about people who had played crucial roles in the
crisis, among them U.S. General Curtis LeMay and
journalist John Scali (Rhodes; Hernandez).
Two sources with the same last name of author
 If you have two sources with authors sharing the same last
name, provide the first initial of the author as well.
 For example: A source by Paula Morgan, and a
source by Ryan Morgan.
 (P. Morgan 53) (R. Morgan 68) = citations
 If you have two authors with the same last name and same first
initial, you will need to provide the full first name.
 John Morgan (John Morgan 21) and Jane Morgan
(Jane Morgan 34)
Internet Sources ~ A Few Reminders
 Omit page numbers to Internet sites
o You cannot list a screen number because monitors differ
o You cannot list a page number of downloaded documents
because computer printers differ
o Unless they are numbered in the document, you cannot list
paragraph numbers. Besides, you would have to go through
and count every paragraph…..!!
Citing Indirect Sources
 Sometimes the writer of a book or article will quote another
person from an interview or personal correspondence, and you
will want to use that same quotation.
o For example, in a newspaper article in USA Today, page 9A,
Karen S. Peterson writes this passage in which she quotes
two other people:
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
Academics, popularity, and athletic competition
will create anxiety for junior high kids and high
schoolers, Eileen Shiff says. “Bring up the topics.
Don’t wait for them to do it; they are nervous and they
want to appear cool.” Monitor the amount of time
high schoolers spend working for money, she
suggests. “Work is important, but school must be the
priority.” Parental intervention in a child’s school
career that worked in junior high may not work in
high school, psychiatrist Martin Greenburg adds.
“The interventions can be constructed by the
adolescent as negative, overburdening, and interfering
with the child’s ability to care for himself.” He adds,
“Be encouraging, not critical. Criticism can be
devastating for the teenager.”
o Suppose that you want to use the quotation above by Martin
Greenburg in your paper. You will need to quote the words
of Greenburg and also put Peterson’s name in the
parenthetical citation as the person who wrote the article:

After students get beyond middle school, they
begin to resent interference by their parents,
especially in school activities. They need some space
from Mom and Dad. Martin Greenburg says, “The
interventions can be constructed by the adolescent as
negative, overburdening, and interfering with the
child’s ability to care for himself” (qtd. in Peterson
9A).
 On the Works Cited page, Peterson’s name will
appear on a bibliography entry, but Greenburg’s name
will not appear there because he is not the author of
the article.
 In other words, you need a double reference that
introduces the speaker and includes a clear reference
to the book or article where you found the quotation
or the paraphrased material. Without the reference to
Peterson, nobody could find the article. Without the
reference to Greenburg, readers would assume that
Peterson had spoken those words.
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Exercise #1
What’s Wrong with these Citations?
Fix the following two citations. Pay special attention to placement, content,
and punctuation. Write the citation on the lines provided.
1. Also, Alice and Siddhartha both went through an initiation, an
increased awareness of the world. For Alice, it was when she realized
that the Queen and her court were “nothing but a pack of cards,” (this
quote was found on page 32 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
which appears in many different editions), not authority figures to be
respected and obeyed without question.
________________________________________________________
2. For Siddhartha, the initiation came when he stopped believing that the
world was illusory and superficial, when he saw that “Meaning and
reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them,
in all of them.” (Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, translated by Hilda
Rosner, published by New Directions in 1951, page 32)
________________________________________________________
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Exercise #2
Be a Peer Editor
The poetry of Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) has other literary
influences. Stanley Kunitz notes “throwbacks” to nursery rhymes, folk
literature, counting songs, the Bible, and Blake. “But,” he adds, “the poems,
original and incomparable, belong to the poet and not his sources.” (Stanley
Kunitz, pages 102 and 103. A further influence is the poetry of both T.S.
Eliot and W.B. Yeats. In Roethke’s Words for the Wind, for instance, the
poem “The Dying Man” is “in a voice almost indistinguishable from
Yeats’s” (W.D. Snodgrass, pp. 104-105). Some critics have attacked
Roethke’s imitation of Yeats, calling it a sign of weakness on Roethke’s part
and a lack of his own ideas and insight (Ralph J. Mills, Jr., page 30).
Roethke’s poems are intensely personal. He takes the evolution of
self as a theme in much of his poetry, occasionally relating it to another, or a
beloved. (Pages 30 and 31 in Mills). An example of the self theme is found
in the poem “Open House”:
My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.
(These are the lines from the poem “Open House.” This poem
was found on page 718 in The New Oxford Book of American Verse,
edited by Richard Ellmann, 1976, Oxford Press).
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Exercise #3
Writing Parenthetical Citations
1. A quotation from page 120 of an article entitled, “Hoop Dreamer”
about Mannie Jackson, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters. The
article was written by Brad Herzog and appears in Sky Magazine,
April 1996, pp. 119-123.
________________________________________________________
2. An article entitled “Eskimo” on page 891 of the Columbia
Encyclopedia, 5th edition, 1993. No author is listed.
________________________________________________________
3. An editorial in the Miami Herald on May 22, 1996, on page 14,
section A. The title of the editorial is “The Habit of Free Elections.”
No author is cited.
________________________________________________________
4. A paraphrase of an idea by Neil Strauss. The article is titled “Rock
Outdoors: An Endangered Species.” It appeared in the New York
Times, Sunday, May 12, 1996, Arts & Leisure, Section H, page 44.
________________________________________________________
5. Women’s Rights in the United States: A Documentary History. The
editors are Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox. The citation refers
to a chart near the beginning of the book, entitled “Significant Dates
in the History of Women’s Rights”, which appears on pages xxxixxxiii.
________________________________________________________
6. A reference to the entire book The Diversity of Life by Edward O.
Wilson. This was published in 1992 by the Harvard University Press.
________________________________________________________
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7. A quotation from 500 Nations: An Illustrated History of North
American Indians by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. published in New York by
Alfred A. Knopf in 1994. The reference is to material entitled, “A
Clash in the Arctic,” pp. 173-181. Josephy’s name appears in the
sentence that ends with the citation.
________________________________________________________
8. A quotation (page 13) from a poem by Theodore Roethke entitled
“Elegy for Jane”. The research paper cites 6 other poems by Roethke.
________________________________________________________
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Exercise #4
Creating Parenthetical Citations
1. Rogers, Dale. Gift from the Sea. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.
2. Samuels, Tom. “The Campus Scramble.” Time 2 May 1988: 66-68.
3. Ponds, Chris. “Moscow’s Big Mac Attack.” The Washington Post 20
Apr. 2003:C1+. (Note: there is another source cited in this paper
by the same author)
4. Time Flies When You’re Having Fun. New York, Bantam Books,
1995: 23-47.
5. Gordon, Cynthia, and Carol Smith. “Can’t Stop Running.” Sports
Illustrated 4 Jun. 1997.
6. Waters, Sam, Jason Jones, and Jessie Hilt. Seeing is Believing.
Detroit:
Bantam Doubleday, 1977.
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7. Elston, Justin. Stellar Sunset. New York: Bantam, 1999. (Note: we
give that author credit in the sentence)
8. Fields, Mary. I Love School. Detroit: Bantam,1989:23-24. (Note,
we give that
author credit in the sentence)
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Exercise #4
Create Citations for Works Cited Page
Works Cited
Adams, Jesse. “Controversial Issues in Today’s Society.” US News & World
Report 13 Jan. 2005: 25-27.
“Capital Punishment Woes.” CNN. 18 Feb. 2006. 15 Apr. 2006
<http://www.cnn.com/capitalpunishment>.
Johnson, Jim. Documenting Sources in MLA Format. New York: Bantam
Books, 2004.
“Lake-Lehman School District Excels.” Times Leader 4 Dec. 2005: 3A.
Masters, April, and Simon Sampson. “A Day in the Life of a Lake-Lehman
Student.” Community News 3 Apr. 2006: 7C.
Miller, Kim, and Tanya Frost. MLA Format for Dummies. Ed. Tom Smith.
San Diego: Berkley Books, 2005. 41-47.
Researching Made Easy. 2000. DVD. Educational Video Network, 2005.
“Research Papers Made Easy.” Education Daily 7 Mar. 2005: 21.
Sherman, Meghan. “Why Educational Movies Work.” United Streaming. 16
Nov. 2005. WVIA. 22 Apr. 2006
<http://www.unitedstreaming.com>.
Stevens, John. Telephone interview. 22 Mar. 2006.
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1. __________________
6. ____________________
2. __________________
7. ____________________
3. __________________
8. ____________________
4. __________________
9. ____________________
5. __________________
10._________________
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