MLA Works Cited Basics

hello friends and welcome back to the channel today we're going to be talking about doing a MLA works cited page I got a few requests for some students over the last couple days of people saying well I don't really know how to do one of these so that's what I'm gonna go over today now I'm gonna preface this by saying there's a little bit of a lesson to be learned here and that is that technology hates you and has no soul in fact this is the second time I've had to record this video because the

first one was completely ruined because little did I know while I was recording the video a a pop-up ad on a news site started playing auto-playing and then because my volume was down on my computer I couldn't hear it but the recorder was picking it up and so I was sitting there explaining MLA while I was listening to Donald Trump talked about coronavirus so that was fun pin anyway I'm gonna show you a little bit of how to do an MLA works cited page and then we're gonna talk about it so the first thing that

I want to go over is what is MLA and why do we have to follow it so MLA stands for the Modern Language Association so the Modern Language Association is a academic organization in the United States that governs how we do academic research papers in certain disciplines including the humanities and super bad surprise English so some times people were saying what why do I have to figure out all of these rules well I'll give you a comparable analogy in another discipline and that is in the sciences so if you look up the periodic table periodic

table is a tool used for scientists to figure out how to reference elements and one that I think is pretty interesting here is effie which stands for iron now I don't know about you but I don't think there's an F in the word iron and part of that the reason that the FES irons because it's Latin for and what that is helpful about that is it allows scientists when they're reading each other's work to have a uniform standard so you can even change the language of the periodic table this looks like what's it this is

Spanish or Portuguese anyway you can still see F EE is still iron you can look in German Fe is still iron you can look in a lot of different languages and Fe is still iron and that's helpful because in the street if you know what the wrong if you have the wrong chemical you can blow things up now in English we're not blowing anything up but we're still going to have to be sort of speaking the same language so to speak and so we follow the same standards so the next question then is what does

a work cited page what is it and how does it work so what you're gonna do what I would suggest is go into Google and what you're going to do is type in I won't like the bird Purdue at a university in develop a and what will come up is I will produce MLA formatting and style guide this is the number one authority on MLA for basically on the internet but there's one caveat that I want to point to see this box here it says cite your source automatically in MLA don't do it here's the

reason why technology has demonstrated by the fact this is the second time I'm recording this video today hates you and has no soul usually what will happen when students use Asian machine is that I will grade their work cited page I will mark it up and then I will turn to them and I will say which citation machine did you use and they will say how do you know I use them a citation machine and I will say because it was wrong all right this is very much the time where I become old man Hogan

and say get off my lawn but citation machines are morons all right you are an intelligent capable human being you are not a but the computers a malama so if you trust the computer to do your citations for you most of the time you're trusting the computer to fail you I advise against using citation machines because to be honest it's easier to actually learn the stuff and then you never have to use a citation machine again granted if the end justifies the means if you get the if you get it the format right go ahead

and use whatever you want as long as it can get you there but my suggestion is to learn how to cite your sources instead of trusting the computer so ya know that so at its core a work cited page is a list of the references that you talked about in the paper right you're making your argument but what you're doing is you're showing all of the people that use ideas you used while you're making the argument in alphabetical order in a way that if someone wanted to figure out where you got your information they could

don't look it up on their own so on owls MLA formatting and style guide there are a couple one and there are a couple of documents that I think are worth looking at one is sample work cited page so this sample work cited page has an example of what a work cited page will look like the only difference here is that this isn't in Times New Roman font but you'll have you'll see that there's a lot of information people's names that end where they got them etc now what I'm gonna do is walk you through

how to cite the three most common types of sources that you're probably going to face in my class so let's start with a book so I'm gonna go to Google Books and I'm just gonna grab any old book here and we're gonna I'm gonna walk you through how to cite it so I don't know let's go influenza influenza the hundred-year cure - okay so I'm gonna click on this book and we're going to to see a spec now most of the time you will find the citation information for a book on the inside jacket right

here you'll find everything you need there now what I would suggest is going first to the owl and then on the side here in the MLA guide it says MLA works cited page books he here is you need to figure out what it what kind of source are you something is the book is the website isn't an article what is it one this Athens book alright and it'll tell you what you need and in what order down here so here's basic book format last name first name title book city of publication publisher publication date so

let's see if we can figure that out for this influenza book alright and then also I'm going to create the work cited page here in word so you can see what I've shown over here so let's put this in the correct font and all that stuff so everything is Times New Roman 12-point font no spaces between paragraphs double-spaced alright so what you're gonna do is you're gonna Center we're excited now keep in mind that this is works cited multiple works alright a lot of times people will say work site or work cited it's not the

way to do it it's works cited there are several works of literature that you are right and then the next thing I'm going to be doing is typing out the required information so the first thing we're looking at looking for is let's make sure keep on checking the video levels cuz I want to make sure that things aren't playing in the background I'm a little gun-shy so so alright last name first name so who's written wrote this book I'm Jeremy brown is that the guy's name yeah Jeremy brown so what we will do is will

write Brown how much Jeremy all right and then the next thing we're gonna do is the title of the book I haven't so in this case it's influenza 100 year how to cure the day so there's that all right now it says you don't need the city of publication most of the time which makes sense a lot of things are in London or New York or something like that so you can usually just do the publisher and that will be just fine so in this case where is our host so it's atria and then from

here we got the year in the year is 2019 2020 okay boom I just did the book now one of the things you'll notice is over here you see how these little guys stick out so they're there they're the last names are sort of sticky Cody and everything else is indented so what a lot of people do is they indent the first line of the sentence but the difficulty there is that this name isn't sticky-outy anymore instead this random word is to Gabby so what you actually want to do is the opposite so you want

to indent everything but the first line all right and so you can hit the tab key now one thing that happens a lot of times in in word processors is sometimes that you know if you hit the tab key it'll just add in everything so sometimes what you can do is you can hit control and then hit the tab key and that will do it as well but this is what it needs to look like so there's a book next thing we're going to be doing is taking a look at how to cite a website

so I'm gonna go up here I'll bake so down here they have books periodicals periodical means means an article but most of the time the kinds of things that you're going to be citing are going to be on the internet nowadays especially with coronavirus nothing and you're going to be citing is going to be in anywhere but the internet so you're gonna want to hit electronic sources under electronic sources we can take a look at what they want so they're talking about URLs abbreviations basic style okay so here they're citing an entire website so this

might be a pretty so let's go and find an entire website so let's go to all sites calm alright so in this case what they want you to do is they they want the editor author or compiler name if available now in this case are there any editor author or compiler names doesn't let's look at the very bottom because sometimes you can find some stuff down there at the bottom down all sides let's see yeah it doesn't look like we've got a clear editor author or compiler name alright and so as you can see here

neither do some of these websites as well so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do the next thing which is the name of the site so go over here all sides alright then [Music] version number name of the institutional organization affiliated with the site okay so let's see if there's any organization affiliated with this so here you can see the founders but I don't think we need need even to cite those because they're technically not like the author so these are some people who they work with but there's no there's no

like organization behind them so we're just gonna keep that the way it was all right and so what we can do then is all right 2020 is the last day they were updated sometimes if you look at the very bottom of a website you can find this citation you're like you can find years and sometimes it's like a copyright year that can be quite helpful right all science comm 2020 and now we need a URL so this is kind of straightforward one considering what we're doing here and then what I'm going to do is an

eighth of access now eight dates of access are not always required but from my class I think it's very helpful to have them because especially with the wave news turns over all the time sometimes it'll be here to pay it here take on MRO and so it's helpful for you explain when you accessed it so I'm going to be asking you to do that and so I'm going to put it here as well it's a beta fan access in this case is 20 seconds 22 April now MLA they abbreviate months down to three letters excess

22 April plays right now I figured that okay so the next thing that's a whole website now let's take a look at a general insight so going back to the news because there's a lot of news all right so here we have some stuff about Harvard and coronavirus stimulus stuff all right so let's go let's go from the side so alright so now I'm on the Wall Street Journal so let's look at what they say for a page on a website so in this case I'm now on a page within a website the bigger website

would be the Wall Street Journal but I'm just on one article so if you go down from citing an entire website to a page on our website this is often the most common thing that you're going to cite on the Internet so I'm gonna minimize this and we're gonna go over here so what do they want so first thing we want last name comma first name all right so who wrote this Bauhaus and Belkin okay so we'll go all house come Rebecca now important thing that my visited here you see how this person I did

their last name first and then their first name and then the second person I did first name and last name that's the way the MLA does it so you only have to switch from around the the name of the first author and then you list the authors either in the order in which they're in the order in which they're listed often that's off abetik order but sometimes it's not so that's what I did next is the title of the article alright so in this case title of the article now something that's worth noting is that

the title of the article is going to consistently be in title case which means you sort of capitalize the major words here alright and you uncut you leave the other ones uncapitalized now the reason you do this even if it's not capitalized in the article is because that's what MLA wants so anyway we're gonna put the article title in footmarks want me to do a period or father okay now we they want the title of the whole website dilution okay so in this case there in this example it's email will appear at the Wall Street

Journal next we have name of institutional organization affiliated with the site now often this is the same as this is the same as the title itself so we're going to take a look and see if there's a parent company behind Wall Street Journal now Dow Jones company so Wall Street Journal the take come first for them let's go and make sure that we're done yeah so Dow Jones company which is the parent company Pines um The Wall Street Journal and then one was this publisher because this bush was today so alright next we're going to

you look boat or I'll do the URL so there's that and then access now one of the things you see here is that this is all this confabulated back into fonts if I make sure that everything is still times font and then also we're going to indent so that's a page on the website so there's one more that I want to go through with you and that is a article in a scholarly database so if you keep scrolling down here you will see an article in an online scholarly Journal these are super common as well

and you're gonna use a lot of them so there's a couple different options for you there's online only online only that or online that also appears in print but most of the time you're gonna use one from from an online database and so I'm going to go to RCC library and I'm gonna log in there and walk you through some of this you said with confidence databases A to Z academic search complete like I said that's kind of a little bit of a pitch wrong and so let's type in influenza right so here here's an

academic journal look at all right so let's follow the instructions now one of the issues I'm seeing here is that there are a gazillion of these these authors now when you have that many authors a lot of times you don't want to list all of them because that's just nobody got time for that let's see if there's any instructions okay I'll look this up this will be helpful for you basic more than one or [Music] okay I might have to Google this one separately so I'm in LA be more than three author's if there are

three or more authors than you list the first author followed by the phrase at fall and Latin for and others that's what I was looking for that's what I wanted to confirm so if there are three or more so in this case we're gonna list the ad in this case we only I'm sorry all of you people you can be left out we're only gonna do this one so is that really right electronic sources basis so now I need the archetype like so okay notice what I just did so I capitalized the title here even

though it wasn't capitalized in the original title that's an MLA thing in other disciplines for instance American Psychological Association APA that's what I use when I write for my doctorate it's different than that so it's just the way it is so you're gonna want to capitalize the titles in or the major words in the titles for MLA articles alright so the next so there I've got my article title next I need the the title of the journal itself so the journal is kind of like a newspaper you know like this was Wall Street Journal which

is a which is a new site similarly this is an article but it's in a journal and let's see what it's called BMC medical genomics all right and we want to italicize the huh next we want volume number year and pages so in this case sometimes this is hard to track but usually it's two numbers right next to each other and I believe it's there so this would be all again now see what's great I just showed you is that even I don't know this 100% I look back at the reference may or may not

inspire confidence in you uh so volume 13 number six our second number 28 that's 2020 and then pages it's the pages that it is on the website so in sometimes even though this is 14 pages long it's part of a longer turn also sometimes the page numbers are a little off so let's see what we got here all right so these go 1 to 13 and then if it's an on on an online database you also need to select database so in my case I was using academic search complete ice dome and then you want

either a URL or a do voi not a DUI a URL or a DOI so a URL is just sort of the website you found it on but for scholarly journal articles many of them a half but is called an AO I which is kind of like a bar code for academic journal articles and you can see there's a DOI here oh that's irritating what just happened oh I'll see you looking at so there's the DUI now I need to give access let's make sure okay so then we want to make sure that everything is

indented correctly so so there's that right and then the last thing we want to do on this work second page is make sure everything's in alphabetical order so we have er a so this is gonna move the a so what we have here now is a BA BR z and there you have it the work cited page for this now there are other kinds of sources that you're likely going to use I think these are probably the four most common some other common ones for instance a YouTube video if instructions their comment on a website

a tweet in case you want to both the president message board email so there are lots and lots and lots of different instructions for how to cite a particular source your job is to go on the owl and figure out what is the source that I'm citing and how do I cite it that's the number one thing you need to do from there you can go in and make the work cited page it might seem a little bit kind of funky but that's the way it works if you have questions comments or concerns on any

of this please don't hesitate to share them with me and I will help you out as easily as I can or as quickly as I thanks for watching and I'll catch you next video