MLA Formatting and Documentation

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MLA Formatting and Documentation

• No Cash or Checks Accepted!
• Only CREDIT
• Plagiarizers will be prosecuted for stolen
  information!

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Setting Up Your Paper
Smith 1 John Smith Miss McFadden American
Literature December 11, 2009 Sin and Its
Effects on the Individual in The Scarlet
Letter First, you need to indent to start a new
paragraph with an opening sentence to grab the
readers attention. Make sure you are double
spacing the entire essay and set up 1 inch
margins. Work towards your thesis statement
about guilt. Then indent, to begin your next
paragraph with support and quotes to support your
thesis!
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No Clue How to Document...?
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No Worries, You Have Options!

• Door 1

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Short Quotations

• To indicate short quotations (fewer than 4
  typed lines) in your text
• 1) Surround the quotation within double quotation
  marks.
• 2) Provide the authors last name and specific
  page number
• Punctuation marks such as periods, commas, and
  semicolons should appear after the parenthetical
  citation.
• Example
• No man for any considerable period, can wear one
  face to himself and another to the multitude,
  without finally getting bewildered as to which
  may be the true (Hawthorne p.212).

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Door 2
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Long Quotations

• 1) Place quotations longer than 4 typed lines in
  a free-standing block of text
• 2) NO quotation marks!
• 3) Separate your sentence from the quote with a
  colon ().
• 4) Start the quotation on a new line, with the
  entire quote indented one inch from the left
  margin
• 5) The block quote should be single spaced
• 6) Your parenthetical citation should come after
  the closing punctuation mark.

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Block Quote Example

• By examining the inner conflict present in
  Reverend Dimmesdale, it is apparent that he has
  slowly been consumed with internal guilt about
  the affair, and must purge this guilt by publicly
  mounting the scaffold to reveal his true face
• We have had, and may still have, worse things to
  tell of him but none, we apprehend, so pitiably
  weak no evidence, at once so slight and
  irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long
  since begun to eat into the real substance of his
  character. No man for any considerable period,
  can wear once face to himself and another to the
  multitude, without finally getting bewildered as
  to which may be the true. (Hawthorne p.212)

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Option 3
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Exception to the In-Text Documentation Rule

• When you credit your author in your sentence, you
  DONT have to include his/her name inside your
  parenthetical documentation.
• Example
• According to Hawthorne, No man for any
  considerable period, can wear one face to himself
  and another to the multitude, without finally
  getting bewildered as to which may be the true
  (p.212).

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• We thought we only needed to document inside our
  writing, so we didnt create a works cited page,
  now were in plagiarism prison for violating MLA
  formatting and documentation guidelines Former
  high school students

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Works Cited

• This is a separate page from your paper!
• You should title this page Works Cited
• Gather and list the following information from
  your site in this order
• Author and/or editor names
• Name of the database, or title of project, book,
  article
• Any version numbers available
• Date of version, revision, or posting
• Publisher information
• Date you accessed the material
• Electronic address, printed between carets (lt,
  gt).

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• Formula Example for an
• Lastname, Firstname. Title of Book. Place of
  Publication Publisher, Year of Publication.
  Medium of Publication.
• Example
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Austin
  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1850. Print

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• Do Not Pass Go
• Do Not Collect 200
• Do Not Think About Turning In Your Product
  Without Documentation!