MLA Citation

MLA citation is the set of rules writers use to show a reader exactly where a piece of evidence came from. Every time a writer borrows someone else's words, facts, or ideas, MLA citation gives the reader two ways to trace that borrowing back to its source: a short marker inside the sentence, called an in-text citation, and a full entry on a Works Cited page at the end of the composition.

An in-text citation stays small on purpose. Right after a quote or a paraphrased idea, the writer adds the author's last name, and a page number if the source has one, inside parentheses. A sentence might read: Kerry Benjoe writes that Indigenous people have been damaged by generations of oppression, but have not been broken (Benjoe). No page number appears here because the source is a web article without printed pages. That short tag is a promise to the reader: check Benjoe on the Works Cited list at the end, and you will find exactly where this claim came from.

The Works Cited entry carries the full weight of that promise. For a web article, MLA asks for the author's name, the title of the article in quotation marks, the name of the website or publication in italics, the date the piece was published, and the URL. Leave out a piece of that information or put it in the wrong order, and a reader loses the trail.

Writers cite sources for two reasons that both matter. The obvious one is honesty. Taking someone else's sentence or idea without a citation is plagiarism, whether the writer meant to steal it or not. The less obvious reason is that citation builds trust. A reader who sees a claim backed by a named, traceable source is more likely to believe it than a reader who is only asked to take the writer's word for it. Citation is not decoration added on top of an argument after the fact. It is part of how the argument earns belief.

Kerry Benjoe is a journalist from Muscowpetung Saulteaux Nation in Saskatchewan, and is Saulteaux, Dakota, and Cree. She spent twenty years reporting across the province before becoming editor of Eagle Feather News. In her 2020 essay for CBC News, "Canada's History with Indigenous People Is Cruel and Unfair, but We Need to Own Up to It," she writes about the Indian Act, the pass system, and residential schools, real, checkable history rather than opinion alone. That is what makes her essay useful for practicing citation. It names facts a careful reader can look up and confirm elsewhere, which means you can build a real MLA citation around it and test whether the claims hold up.

Before you read Benjoe's essay, hold these questions in mind. What is one fact in the essay that you did not already know? If someone doubted that fact was true, where would you go to check it?