If you’re including only a few quotations in your text,
it’s easiest to cite your sources right in the text, rather than
using footnotes.
Most in-text citations will follow the quoted material.
If you’re citing a source for the first time in your text, list
the author’s name, the title
(in italics), the location of the publishing company, the year of
publication, and the page number. Note that the punctuation separating
these items differs from the punctuation separating items in bibliography
citations. Note also that closing punctuation goes outside, not
inside, the parentheses.
• When she hears a hiss, Vera thinks
of “escaped pet boa constrictors, alligators in the sewers, all
manner of deceptively domesticated animals” (Francine Prose, Bigfoot
Dreams [New York: Henry Holt, 1986], 157).
If a quotation ends with a question mark or an exclamation
point, and the quotation is placed at the end of a sentence, keep
the original mark and place a period after the closing parentheses.
• Hermione asks, “‘But leaving me apart,
Rupert; do you think the children are better, richer, happier, for
all this knowledge; do you really think they are?”
(D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, 55).
The second time you cite a source, and thereafter,
you don’t need to include all the information about the source.
• Vera “can’t imagine an answer that
doesn’t make the hippo kid in his hippo T-shirt seem like somebody’s
mean joke” (Prose, Bigfoot Dreams, 57).
If you’re citing just one source in your work, you
can shorten the citations even more. List the information in full
once, and then simply reference page numbers or, in the case of
plays, act, scene, and line numbers.
• In a “fiery” mood, Ivanhoe “lent but
a deaf ear to the prior’s grave advices and facetious jests” (453).
Quotations placed in mid-sentence should be cited at
the end of
the sentence. You don’t need to cite the work directly after the
closing
quotation mark.
• In contrast to Nick Carraway’s house,
which is “an eyesore,” Gatsby’s residence is an immense mansion
modeled after a French hotel (Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby,
9).
Occasionally, you’ll find that a citation fits better
before a quotation, rather than after it. In this case, you don’t
need to include every last detail about the source.
• In the first chapter of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The
Hobbit (Ballantine Books, 1965), hobbits are described
as “a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the
bearded Dwarves.”
