MLA documentation

1. Plagiarism, Parenthetical Documentation & Literary Present Tense

8. SAMPLE In India, film music creates a heightened mood that accounts for a great deal of the power of Hindi movies , says Nasreen Munni Kabir (41). The writer has paraphrased too closely by only changing a few words and switching order of phrases. A paraphrase should be in the writer’s own words.

10. SAMPLE Nasreen Munni Kabir argues that the film songs disseminate from the movies to pervade several other aspects of Indian life (41). The writer has paraphrased the source too closely by borrowing the sentence structure of the original and then plugging in synonyms.

11. ORIGINAL SOURCE For many Southerners it was psychologically impossible to see a black man bearing arms as anything but an incipient slave uprising complete with arson, murder, pillage, and raping. From pg. 158 of The Sable Arm , a book by historian Dudley Taylor Cornish

12. CORRECT SAMPLE Civil War historian Dudley Taylor Cornish observes that many Southerners were so terrified of slave revolt that the sight of armed black men filled them with fear (158). Correctly paraphrased in writer’s own words and documented with an MLA in-text citation.

13. MLA Citations

18. Obierika points out the impossibility of the colonialists understanding anything about the Umuofians without speaking their language, “’How can he when he does not even speak our tongue ? ’” (151). If a question mark or exclamation point is part of the quotation, leave in the quoted text.