Title: READ: In-text Citations
Course: Computer Technology

Sometimes, you need to quote something directly in a report. You can’t just copy what someone else has said and put it in your writing – this will seem like you are the one that has said it. Plagiarism will also discredit your entire piece of writing. Instead, you need to use an in-text citation to correctly quote another person, article, book, etc.

To do this, you will list your book/article/website that you are quoting from in your bibliography. Like so:

Works Cited

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc., 2007. Print.

Then, you will locate the quote in your book. I am going to open Harry Potter and find one. Here’s a good one I found on page 471:

And she pushed back her sleeve and touched her forefinger to the Dark Mark.

Let me show you how to cite this quote correctly in your document. MLA formatting is the most common. Since we are going to use MLA format for our bibliographies, I will show you how to use in-text citations with MLA format.

Go to http://www.library.cornell.edu/resrch/citmanage/mla and read the list of exceptions and how you should cite anything using MLA in-text citations.

My quote doesn’t have the author’s name in it, so there is no way to identify the quote in the bibliography with just a page number. Instead, the cornell website tells me that to correctly cite this quote, I put the author’s last name and the the page number(s) in parentheses after the quote. That way, if an interested reader wants to see where that quote came from, he/she can go to my bibliography, see the reference, and now they have the page number too!

My Report

... I love Harry Potter and this is my report surrounding the quote. He said, “and she pushed back her sleeve and touched her forefinger to the Dark Mark.” (Rowling 471) I think that is just awesome! This report is so good it deserves an A plus...