How To: Citations

Your Name

Miss Babiar

Literature 6 or 7 or 8

Date

Citation Guidelines

All of the following are considered plagiarism: turning in someone else’s work as your own, copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit, failing to put a quotation in quotation marks, giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation, changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit. At its core, plagiarism is an act of fraud.  It involves both stealing someone else’s work and lying about it afterward. So to avoid committing fraud, you must use citations.

When quoting an author’s work, you should include the author’s last name either in the sentence or in the citation itself. For example:

·         In A Key to Modern British Poetry, Lawrence Durrell states that fiction is “cyclic rather than extended” (26).

·         Fiction is characterized as “cyclic rather than extended” (Durrell 26).

·         Durrell extensively explores the form of fiction as “cyclic rather than extended” (26).

All the citations above, (26) or (Durrell 26), tell the reader that the quotation can be found on page 26 of a work by an author named Durrell. Note that if you provide a signal word, such as the author’s name, you do not need to include it in the citation.

For example:

·         Durrell extensively explores the form of fiction as “cyclic rather than extended” (Durrell 26).

If your readers want more information on the source, they would find that information on your Works Cited Page. The citation should be formatted as follows:

Durrell, Lawrence. A Key to Modern British Poetry. Norman: U of Oklahoma, 1952. Print.

            However, you will not need a Works Cited Page unless a) it is a research paper or b) I tell you otherwise.