Quotations in MLA Style When there’s no line number to cite… ✔ My favorite poem is “Seriously.” ✖ My favorite poem is “Seriously”. ✔ Once again Alexie uses the word “Indian.” When you’re citing a line number… ✔ Once again Alexie uses the word “Indian” (15). The period or comma goes inside the quotation marks when there is no line number to cite in parentheses. Otherwise, the comma or period goes after the parenthetical citation.

Quoting in MLA Style ✔ Anne Bradstreet frames the poem with a sense of mortality: “All things within this fading world hath end” (1). ✖ Anne Bradstreet frames the poem with a sense of mortality: All things within this fading world hath end.” (1)

Exceptions….

Longer Quotations

Example Paper: Integrating Textual Evidence Hughes purposefully confuses the reader at the beginning of the second stanza. The line “hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page” (19) involves many pronouns in a short space. The referents of these pronouns are not clearly delineated. The speaker may be at once addressing and invoking himself, the instructor, the reader, and Harlem. The narrator makes these identities blur together, which reinforces his point in lines that he is not so different from people of other races: “I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like / the same things other folks like who are other races” (25-26). The enjambment of these lines allows the phrase “doesn’t make me not like” to, for a moment, mean that the speaker is alike—similar to—people of other races. One can take line 25 by itself, in other words, before it continues on to line 26. It’s significant, too, that line 25 uses a double negative. Line 25 refuses to secure an affirmative position; rather, the poem works to confuse all sureness about difference. This all suggests the possibility of equality, which is not equivalent to sameness in the poem.

The following paragraph is excerpted from a short paper about William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis” written by Deanna Ludwin. In the first stanza, Nature is sympathetic to "him who in the love of Nature holds/Communion with her visible forms" (1- 2). Though in her lover's "gayer hours" she generously offers her most cheerful self—her "voice of gladness" and her "smile" and eloquence of beauty"—she is present to help him during his "darker musings" too (3-6). However, when Nature's lover thinks of death and all of its accompaniments—the "shroud, and pall/... and the narrow house" (11-12), then Nature offers him solace with her "teachings... / [her] Earth and her waters, and the depths of air" (15-16). Curiously, the speaker sees Nature offering comfort through the earth as a tomb as well—the great tomb of man" (45), a tomb decorated by all of earth's "visible forms": hills, woods, rivers, brooks, meadows, and Ocean (37-43). Certainly, this is an image to soothe us, not to frighten us. Q: What do the numbers inside the ( ) indicate? A: These are the numbers of the lines from which the quotes are taken. Q: Why are some letters and words placed inside brackets [ ]? A: Because they are my words, not the poet's. I have included them to clarify meaning or to smoothly incorporate the quotation into the text. Q: Why do I refer to "man" rather than "human"? Isn't this sexist? A: Perhaps it is, but since Bryant uses the term "man" and the pronouns "he" and "him," so do I. Q: What does the slash ( / ) mean? A: This shows where a line of poetry ends. Use a slash only to show where one line ends and another begins. Q: What does an ellipsis (... ) mean? A: This shows where a word or phrase has been left out.