Documentation guide

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology - Samuel Cohen 2017


Documentation guide

Engaging with the work of others is an important part of academic writing. When writing formal essays about the works in 50 Essays, or when you refer in your writing to other outside sources, you need to acknowledge these sources. When you summarize, paraphrase, or quote outside sources in your writing, it is crucial that you properly acknowledge them. It is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that you are joining the intellectual discussion, writing not just about your own ideas and about your own experience but in conversation with the ideas and experiences of others. Second, it is your ethical responsibility to acknowledge when the words and ideas that appear in your work do not originate with you; if you don’t, you will be guilty of plagiarism, a serious academic offense carrying serious consequences and also an act of dishonesty.

Documentation is the word for the activity of acknowledging sources. There are different systems or styles of documentation; the style most often used in English and the humanities is that recommended by the Modern Language Association (MLA). Below are some examples of the most common kinds of documentation in MLA style; consult the MLA Handbook, eighth edition, at style/mla.org for additional information and models.

MLA parenthetical citations

MLA style is fairly simple. When you need to cite a source, you do so in a parenthetical in-text citation. Rather than use footnotes or endnotes, you insert, before the period at the end of the sentence, a parenthetical reference that lets readers know the source and, usually, where in the source the particular material can be found. If the source is clear from the sentence itself, you need only include a page number in parentheses; if the source is not clear, including the author’s name along with the page number will be enough to allow the reader to find the source in the list of works cited, which you will include at the end of your essay (guidelines for which follow this section). Below are some examples of the most common kinds of parenthetical citations. There are a number of exceptions to these general rules; you’ll find these below too.

ONE AUTHOR

The Emigrants begins: “At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live” (Sebald 3).

TWO AUTHORS

According to the Enlightenment, “thinking is the creation of unified, scientific order and the derivation of factual knowledge from principles” (Horkheimer and Adorno 83).

THREE OR MORE AUTHORS

As one letter to the editor of an intellectual journal put it: “Eighteen months later, the CIA is still stonewalling” (Blakey et al. 65).

UNKNOWN AUTHOR

Of the avian flu, a recent editorial states: “Nobody has the foggiest idea whether a pandemic will arrive in the near future or how severe one might be, but federal officials argue, persuasively, that we have to brace ourselves for the worst” (“Vaccine Capacity” A22).

SOURCE WITHOUT PAGE NUMBERS

As a recent article on the Web periodical Inside Higher Education explains, in many federal agencies, “it is standard practice for external groups to formally ask officials to begin a process to review a specific rule or set of rules” (Lederman).

INDIRECT SOURCE

In his autobiography, Ford wrote, “If I’m remembered, it will probably be for healing the land” (qtd. in Patterson 94).

MLA list of works cited

The works cited list is the place where your reader can go to find out more information about the sources cited in your parenthetical citations. Follow these guidelines for the format for this list, which should be given its own page or pages: it should be organized alphabetically by author’s last name or first major word in the title; it should be double-spaced; each entry should begin at the left margin; and the second (and all following) lines of an entry should be indented one tab (or five spaces, or one half inch).

Books

ONE AUTHOR

Cohen, Samuel. After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s. U of Iowa P, 2009.

TWO AUTHORS

Mohlenbrock, Robert H., and Paul M. Thomson, Jr. Flowering Plants: Smartweeds to Hazelnuts. 2nd ed., Southern Illinois UP, 2009.

THREE OR MORE AUTHORS

Cunningham, Stewart, et al. Media Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

TWO OR MORE BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

García, Cristina. Dreams of Significant Girls. Simon and Schuster, 2011.

---. The Lady Matador’s Hotel. Scribner, 2010.

BOOK WITH AN EDITOR OR TRANSLATOR

Ullmann, Regina. The Country Road: Stories. Translated by Kurt Beals, New Directions Publishing, 2015.

WORK IN AN ANTHOLOGY

Hughes, Langston. “Salvation.” 50 Essays, edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 185—87.

MULTIVOLUME WORK

Stark, Freya. Letters. Edited by Lucy Moorehead, Compton Press, 1974—82. 8 vols.

EDITION OTHER THAN THE FIRST

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed., U of Minnesota P, 2008.

Periodicals

ARTICLE IN A JOURNAL

Matchie, Thomas. “Law versus Love in The Round House.” Midwest Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, Summer 2015, pp. 353—64.

ARTICLE IN A MONTHLY MAGAZINE

Bryan, Christy. “Ivory Worship.” National Geographic, Oct. 2012, pp. 28—61.

ARTICLE IN A WEEKLY MAGAZINE

Grossman, Lev. “A Star Is Born.” Time, 2 Nov. 2015, pp. 30—39.

ARTICLE IN A NEWSPAPER

Bray, Hiawatha. “As Toys Get Smarter, Privacy Issues Emerge.” The Boston Globe, 10 Dec. 2015, p. C1.

EDITORIAL OR LETTER TO THE EDITOR

“The Road toward Peace.” The New York Times, 15 Feb. 1945, p. 18. Editorial.

Electronic Sources

ENTIRE WEB SITE

Transparency International. Transparency International: The Global Coalition against Corruption. 2015, www.transparency.org/.

SHORT WORK FROM A WEB SITE

“Social and Historical Context: Vitality.” Arapesh Grammar and Digital Language Archive Project, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, www.arapesh.org/socio_historical_context_vitality.php. Accessed 22 Mar. 2016.

WORK FROM A SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

Fahey, John A. “Recalling the Cuban Missile Crisis.” The Washington Post, 28 Oct. 2012, p. A16. Letter. LexisNexis Library Express, www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/Inpubliclibraryexpress/.

ONLINE BOOK

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard UP, 2014. Google Books, books.google.com/books?isbn=0674369556.

ARTICLE IN AN ONLINE PERIODICAL

Leonard, Andrew. “The Surveillance State High School.” Salon, 27 Nov. 2012, www.salon.com/2012/11/27/the_surveillance_state_high_school/.

E-MAIL

Thornbrugh, Caitlin. “Coates Lecture.” Received by Rita Anderson, 20 Oct. 2015. E-mail.

Other Sources

ADVERTISEMENT

AT&T. National Geographic, Dec. 2015, p. 14. Advertisement.

INTERVIEW

Putin, Vladimir. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose: The Week, PBS, 19 June 2015.

GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT

United States, Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Child Nutrition Programs. Eligibility Manual for School Meals: Determining and Verifying Eligibility. National School Lunch Program, July 2015, www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/cn/SP40_CACFP18_SFSP20-2015a1.pdf.

FILM, VIDEO, OR DVD

Scott, Ridley, director. The Martian. Performances by Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, and Kate Mara, Twentieth Century Fox, 2015.

TELEVISION OR RADIO PROGRAM

“Free Speech on College Campuses.” Washington Journal, narrated by Peter Slen, C-SPAN, 27 Nov. 2015.