Most of our ACC Databases will provide citations for your sources -- you just have to know where to look. For the purposes of this Instructions for Paste and Spellcheck class, you'll always want to look for the MLA citation.
Look for the words "Cite," "Cite This," "Citation" or something similar. Sometimes, this is represented by symbol like:
Remember -- for this paper, always look for the MLA citation!
Interested in learning more about how and why we cite our sources? Take a few minutes and go through our Academic Honesty/Plagiarism Tutorial:
This short video shows how to make the hanging indents for your sources, one of the requirements on an MLA Works Cited page:
One good way to make sure your MLA citations are in good shape is to compare them with sample citations for the same type of sources you're using. For instance, you might want to make sure your newspaper article sources matches up with a sample newspaper article source. Here are some places to get examples:
ACC Libraries MLA Documentation Guide
Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) MLA Formatting and Style Guide
Getting the citations for your Works Cited list is important, but another important part of the process is showing the person reading your paper where you used those works (or resources). The process is called In-Text Citation, and you use it for both paraphrasing (using your own words) and direct quotation. There are two ways to do it:
In the first instance, you work the author of your paper into the text of a phrase, and then list the page number of the source you used. For example:
As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, “At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Moorland held archives, papers, collections, and virtually any book ever written by or about black people” (47).
The other way you can do it is to just to write the quote or your paraphrased sentence without mentioning the author, and then including the author in the in-text citation, like this:
In an article on the benefits of video games and flow state, it is argued that when players work together collaboratively, they can improve their results in the game, while also completing all required learning outcomes (Vras 117-118).
There are plenty of places where you can find examples of these two style, but two good ones are:
ACC Libraries MLA Documentation Guide
Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) MLA In-Text Citations: The Basics