MLA In-Text Citations, Advanced

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Occasionally, you may want to place your citation before the sentence ends for the sake of clarity. This can happen for a few reasons such as citing two different works within the same sentence, having more quotations than page numbers, or to distinguish between another author’s ideas and your own.

In all of these cases, the two basic ways of citing a source apply. You may either cite the author and page number at the end of each clause,

Example: Canada’s literary history has been described as “a fractured discourse” (Howells and Kröller 2), an idea echoed by a Jewish Canadian novelist who writes in French and feels she occupies a position “neither fully within nor fully without” (Robin 182).

Or you may incorporate the authors or titles of the works into the sentence and consolidate the page numbers at the end.

Example: Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller suggest that Canada’s literary history “has always been a fractured discourse” in which a writer may feel–in the words of Jewish Canadian Novelist Régine Robin–“neither fully within, nor fully without” (2; 182).

Notice that in both examples the parenthetical citation comes before the punctuation in the clause or sentence.

In the case that you have more quotations from a single work than there are unique page numbers, it is more clear to insert the page number at the end of the quoted passages.

Example: In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski argues that, instead of “digging down” or “standing back” (52), readers should be “forging links between things that were previously unconnected” to make “something new” (173, 174).

(Examples taken from MLA Handbook 9th Edition, pages 260-261).

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