Jamie Olson, Ph.D.

Saint Martin’s University

Working with Sources

The following examples use MLA style for in-text parenthetical citations. Each of them links a
quotation, paraphrase, or summary that came earlier in the sentence to a bibliographical entry
that would appear in the Works Cited list at the end of the paper. In writing, explain the
situation when you would use each of these variations:
1) …end of sentence (164).
2) …end of sentence (Achebe 164).
3) …end of sentence (Achebe, Things 164).
Your explanation:

Below is a bibliographical entry for a webpage, formatted according to MLA style, just as it
would appear in a Works Cited list. Using this one as a model, write your own entry for the
sample op-ed or letter to the editor that you brought with you today.
Takei, George. “They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.” The
Washington Post, 18. Nov. 2016. Accessed 14 Feb. 2022.
Entry for your article:
 Jamie Olson, Ph.D.
Saint Martin’s University

Below is a sample bibliographical entry for a book, formatted according to MLA style, just as it
would appear in a Works Cited list. Using this entry as a model, write your own entry for the
book that you found in the stacks on the second floor of the O’Grady Library. Publication
information can be found on the title page and the copyright page that immediately follows it.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helen Iswolsky, Indiana
University Press, 1984.
Entry for your book:

Here are two sample bibliographical entries—one for an article found in an academic journal
through a library database, and one for an essay printed in a book—formatted according to
MLA style, just as they would appear in a Works Cited list. Using these entries as a model, write
your own entry for one of the sources that you have chosen to respond to in your next essay.
Servitje, Lorenzo. “‘Triumphant Health’: Joseph Conrad and Tropical Medicine.”
Literature and Medicine, vol. 34 no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 132-157. Project MUSE,
accessed 12 Feb. 2022.
Mendelson, Edward. “The Two Audens and the Claims of History.” Representing
Modernist Texts: Editing as Interpretation, edited by George Bornstein,
University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp. 157-70.
Entry for one of your sources:
 Jamie Olson, Ph.D.
Saint Martin’s University

When you paraphrase, you restate a sentence or short passage in your own words, adhering
more closely to the author’s ideas that you would in a summary. But be careful not to
unintentionally repeat the author’s key words or turns of phrase. Here is a paraphrase of two
sentences in E. B. White’s classic essay “Once More to the Lake”:
ORIGINAL QUOTATION: “Peace and goodness and jollity. The only thing that was wrong
now, really, was the sound of the place, an unfamiliar nervous sound of the
outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would
sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving” (373-74).
PARAPHRASE: After noting with satisfaction how little has changed at the lake, White is
disappointed to discover that the boats sound different than they did when he
was a boy.
Write a one-sentence paraphrase of several sentences from one of your sources. Please
provide the original quotation first, as I did above:
 Jamie Olson, Ph.D.
Saint Martin’s University

When quoting directly from a source, you must introduce the quotation and follow it with an
explanation to make clear to your audience how the passage relates to your own ideas.
Always use a signal phrase (e.g., “White writes...,” “From White’s perspective…”) to
emphasize whose text you are quoting from and to incorporate their language smoothly into
your own prose. Here is an example of a properly introduced quotation from White’s essay
with an explanation afterwards:
Early one morning, after hearing his son sneak out of the cabin and paddle away
silently in the canoe, the author remembers that he had done the same as a boy,
which makes him feel as though he were reliving his own past through another’s eyes.
White explains, “I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple
transposition, that I was my father” (371). Here and throughout the essay, the
distinction between White, his father, and his son remains hazy.
Write a sentence that introduces a brief quotation from one of your sources, another that
uses a signal phrase to incorporate the sentence into your prose, and a third that follows the
quotation and gives an explanation for it: