Your sources are the people who created the articles, books, videos, infographics, presentations, photographs, music lyrics, and whatever else you are using to answer your research question.

When writing from multiple sources, you are like the conductor of an orchestra. You are using ideas, events, statements, stories, and analyses from many other people... but YOU are the person who is directing what source "makes noise" when, and how it sounds to the reader.

When quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing any source, you must include an in-text citation.

Any information in your paper that makes a statement of fact, or assumption, or conclusion, description, etc. that is outside your own personal experience should be followed by a citation. If you write an introductory paragraph that reads: "siblings have been arguing since the dawn of time," I will ask you to cite your source, because you weren't around at the dawn of time.

Why include a citation?

Two reasons:

It helps other scholars find the information that you found. As a college-educated person, you'll have access to information that others do not. Soon, you will be the trustworthy source of info that others read.
If you don't, it's plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking the words and ideas of others and presenting them as if they are your own. If you don't make it clear that you collected that information from another source, we're assuming that you yourself are reporting from your own experience. If you are not, it's plagiarism. Students who plagiarize may get 0 points on an assignment, an E in a course, or be withdrawn from the University.

How do you use in-text citation?

Here's an example paragraph:

While working on a degree at MIT, Joy Buolamwini wrote computer code for a program that used a web camera and facial recognition software. The camera didn't recognize her face. Buolamwini realized that the camera could "see" a white face, but not a black face. She completed her project by coding in a white mask. In a 2016 TED talk, she explains that the person who programmed the web camera didn't use a training set with a diverse range of faces. She warns that algorithmic bias can spread rapidly, and affect all aspects of our daily lives. (Buolamwini.) Four years later, users of Twitter point out that photos of people of different races were being cropped differently by Twitter's algorithm. When posting a composite image with a photo of Mitch McConnell, a white Senator from Kentucky, and Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States, the image preview always cropped out Obama and framed McConnell's face perfectly (@Bascule.) In response, Twitter responded, "it's clear we've got more work to do" (@TwitterSupport.)

How many direct quotes do you see in this paragraph?

One.

How many in-text citations do you see? They are in parentheses, (like this.) In-text citations are placed at the end of a sentence, as close to the moment where you the writer as calling on that source to "speak" or provide information and details.

Three.

Why are there three citations if there's only one direct quote? Because I needed to also cite the tweet that demonstrated Twitter's image-cropping bias, which I described and paraphrased, and the TED talk by Joy Buolamwini, which I summarized.

How do you cite a book? video? tiktok? photo in an archive? song lyric?

Here's a link to the Purdue OWL guide to MLA In-Text Citations (click here!) (Links to an external site.) It's every writing professor's go-to resource for "how do I cite..." questions.

MLA in-text citations often consist of an author's last name, followed by the page number where that information was found. In my example paragraph above, the sources were online lectures and tweets, so no page number is seen.