Parenthetical Documentation of Sources

You must acknowledge all information gained from outside sources when writing a paper. Generally three types of information must be acknowledged to avoid plagiarism: direct quotation, paraphrase or summary, and author's ideas. In 1984, the Modern Language Association (MLA) adopted Parenthetical Documentation which uses publication information and page number within the text to distinguish it from your own writing. Use the following guidelines to document sources in your own papers: 1. Introduce the beginning of borrowed material to distinguish it from your own writing. Typically this is done with a brief introduction of the author and some reference to his/her credentials: Lynnette and Thomas Long, two of the foremost recognized experts on the trend of latchkey children, define latchkey as "...children who are regularly left during some period of the day to supervise themselves... or for whom care arrangements are so loosely made they are virtually ineffective" (17). *An ellipsis, three periods, indicates an omission within a quotation. *If you use the authors last name as an introduction, you do not need to use it in parentheses. 2. Works by one author. Give the author's last name in parentheses at the end of a sentence, followed by page numbers (Jones 58). 3. Works with more than one author. List all the last names in parentheses, or give one last name followed by et. al. (Smith, Jones, and Wilcox 87). or (Smith et al. 87). Be consistent; if you use et al. in the Works Cited use it within the paper. 4. Works with no author listed. When citing an article that does not identify an author, in particular websites, use the title of the work or a shortened version of it. ("Robotics" 398). 5. Two works by the same author. If you use more than one work by the same author, give the title, or a shortened version, after the author's last name. (Jones, Robots 398). 6. Two authors with the same last name. Give the authors first initial. If the initials are the same, use the entire first name. (A. Peterson 16) (R. Peterson 34). 7. Material from a personal interview. Following the material from the interview, include the individual's name in parentheses. (Brooks).

8. Indirect quotations. When a writers or speakers quoted words appear in a source written by someone else, begin the citation with the abbreviation qtd. in. Example: Ravitch argues that high school schools are pressured to act as social services; they dont do that well (qtd. in Weisman 259). 9. Quotation within a quotation. Use single quotation marks ( ) to indicate where a quotation within a quotation begins and ends. Use this punctuation when the passage you want to quote is already enclosed in double quotation marks. Example: Upon later being asked about his observations of flying saucers, pilot Kenneth Arnold explained, By no stretch of the imagination did I observe balloons, mock suns, ice crystals, or clouds (Reese 6). 10. Citations by the same author within a paragraph. If you have more than one citation from the same source within a single paragraph and no other sources intervene, you may leave out the authors last name and use a page number. Example: Digital textbooksmight become common place (Kenney 9). However, schools must also consider the huge question of access (10).