Monday, February 4, 2013

How would you do an in-text citation for a website article with no author or page number available in the MLA format?

Online sources often pose challenges when you're including
them in papers in which you use in-text or internal citation. Many of these websites, in
fact, do not include authors or page numbers, so you need to consult guides that
specifically address the use of electronic
sources.


According to Research and Documentation
in the Electronic Age
by Diana Hacker and Barbara
Fister,


Your in-text citation for an electronic source
should follow the same guidelines as for other sources. If the source lacks page numbers
but has numbered paragraphs, sections, or divisions, use those numbers with the
appropriate abbreviation in your in-text citation: “par.,” “sec.,” “ch.,” “pt.,” and so
on. Do not add such numbers if the source itself does not use them. In that case, simply
give the author or title in your in-text citation.


Here is an example:


Julian Hawthorne
points out profound differences  between his father and Ralph Waldo Emerson but
concludes that, in their lives and their writing, “together they met the needs of nearly
all that is worthy in human nature” (ch. 4).


Notice that in
this example the author's name is included in the text itself, so no parenthetical
citation is needed. What, however, should you do if you have no
author?


You should cite the title of the web page itself so
the in-text citation correlates with the entry on the Works Cited page. Assuming that
the title of the website is "Emerson and Hawthorne," that title is what you'd put as the
in-text citation---nothing else is needed.


For more
information about this topic, you can check Duke University's OWL (Online Writing Lab)
at the website listed below.

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