MLA In-Text Citation

When you make a claim in an essay, your reader has one question: how do you know that. An MLA in-text citation answers that question without breaking the flow of your sentence. It is a short note, usually just the author's last name in parentheses, placed right where you use a piece of evidence, not stacked in a pile at the end of your paragraph.

Writers cite for three reasons. Citation lets a reader check the claim against the original source instead of taking the writer's word for it. It gives credit to the person who did the original thinking, reporting, or research. And it draws a clear line between the writer's own argument and someone else's, so a reader always knows whose idea they are reading.

MLA format keeps citation simple. If a source has page numbers, like most books, write the author's last name followed by the page number, with no comma between them: (Cuthand 42). Most news and opinion writing online has no page numbers, so you cite the author's last name alone: (Cuthand). If you already name the author in your own sentence, such as "Cuthand argues that," you do not need to repeat the name in the parentheses.

Doug Cuthand, a member of the Little Pine First Nation, wrote a 2018 CBC Opinion piece called "This is not gouging but simply parity: Crooked Lake lease increases a fair move by Sakimay First Nation." His claim: Sakimay First Nation was right to raise the lease rates it charges non-Indigenous cottage owners on its Crooked Lake waterfront, in the Qu'Appelle Valley. His strongest piece of evidence is not a statistic pulled from a report. It is his own cabin lease at a different lake, which the provincial government raised from $1,200 to $5,700 a year, on land that was not even lakefront. A student citing that evidence in their own essay might write it like this: Cuthand strengthens his claim about fairness by pointing to his own cabin lease, which rose to nearly four times what Sakimay charges for genuine lakefront property (Cuthand). Notice that the sentence uses the evidence, states what it proves, and cites it, all without breaking stride.

A citation is not decoration. Leave it out, and a reader has no way of knowing whether "his own cabin lease rose to $5,700" is something Cuthand actually wrote or something the student invented. Put it in, and the claim becomes checkable. That difference is the whole reason citation exists.

Before You Read

As you read Cuthand's essay, track every piece of evidence he brings in to support his claim. Which pieces come from history, and which come from his own experience? If you had to pick the single strongest piece of evidence in the essay, which one would you choose, and would a reader need to see it cited to believe it?