English 100
Professor McNeil
Rules for Proper Citation of Research in English Classes
In general the purpose of citing outside work in your research paper is to:
 
  • Show that you have obtained information from outside sources and are not attempting to pass off the ideas of others as your own, and
  • Make it easy for your reader to see where you got your information and to look them up your sources if desired.

    • The Rules:

    Short quotations can be included in the body of your text in double-quotation marks with a citation in parentheses:

    In the Mall of America near Minneapolis incredibly "140,00 hot dogs [are] sold each week" (Guterson 398).

    or,

    As David Guterson writes in his essay on the mall, "140,000 hot dogs [are] sold each week" (398).

    Long quotations of three lines or more of text should be a) indented 10 spaces, b) not in quotation marks, c) with ending punctuation before documentation:

    The most incredible fact about the Mall of America is simply its huge size:

    140,000 hot dogs sold each week, 10,000 permanent jobs, 44 escalators and 17 elevators, 12,750 parking places, 13,300 short tons of steel, $1 million in cash disbursed weekly from 8 automatic-teller machines. Opened in the summer of 1992, the mall . . . is a five-minute drive from the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. [T]he Mall of America was the "largest fully enclosed . . . retail and family entertainment complex . . . ." (Guterson 398) When referring to an outside source in your paper, give its full title, author, and publication details in a Works Cited list at the end of your paper.

    For more information about the proper forms of citation for any type of source imaginable, see the MLA Style Guide available at Reference at the ECSU library (or at http://www.mla.org/set_stl.htm), or ask me.