footnoting with mla

Footnoting with MLA

Footnotes

In your text, place a superscript number at the end of the sentence containing the material you have referred to or quoted, like this1

Create footnotes in Word: Ctrl+Alt+F

Footnotes

A footnote should consist of the author’s name, the title (the place of publication, the name of the publisher, the year the document was published) and a page reference.

A book by a single author

1 Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, 2002) 32.

An anthology or a compilation

2 Susan Ostrov Weisser, ed., Women and Romance: A Reader (New York: New York UP, 2001).

A book by two or more authors

3 James W. Marquart, Sheldon Ekland Olson, and Jonathan R. Sorensen, The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990 (Austin: U of Texas, 1994) 52-57.

A book by a corporate author

4 Public Agenda Foundation, The Health Care Crisis: Containing Costs, Expanding Coverage (New York: McGraw, 1992) 69.

A work in an anthology

5 Isabel Allende, “Toad’s Mouth,” trans. Margaret Sayers Peden, A Hammock beneath the Mangoes: Stories from Latin America, ed. Thomas Colchie (New York: Plume, 1992) 83.

An article in a reference book

“Mandarin,” The Encyclopedia Americana, 1994 ed.

A Multivolume Work

13 Paul Lauter et al., eds., The Health Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., vol. 2 (Boston: Hougthon, 2002).

A government publication

21 United Nations, Centre on

Transnational Corporations, Foreign Direct Investment, the Service Sector, and International Banking (New York: United Nations, 1987) 4-6.

The published proceedings of a conference

22 Steve S. Chang, Lily Liaw, and

Josef Ruppenhofer. Eds., Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 12-15, 1999: General Session and Parasession on Loan Word Phenomena (Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Soc., 2000).

An article in a scholarly journal

3 Marisa Lajolo, “The Female Reader on Trial,” Brasil 14 (1995): 75-76.

An article in a newspaper

5 Kenneth Chang, “The Melting (Freezing) of Antarctica,” New York Times 2 Apr. 2002, late ed.: F1.

An article in an magazine

8 Annie Murphy Paul, “Self-Help: Shattering the Myths,” Psychology Today Mar.-Apr. 2001: 60.

A review

9 John Updike, “No Brakes,” rev. of Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, by Richard Lingeman, New Yorker 4. Feb. 2002: 77-78.

A document from an Internet site

1 “Selected Seventeenth-Century Events,” Romantic Chronology, ed. Laura Mandell and Alan Liu, 1999, U of California, Santa Barbara, 22 June 2002 <http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/>.

An entire Internet site

2 Romantic Chronology, ed. Laura Mandell and Alan Liu, 1999, U of California, Santa Barbara, 22 June 2002 <http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/>

An article in an online periodical

3 Gabrielle Dane, “Reading Ophelia’s Madness,” Exemplaria 10.2 (1998), 22 June 2002 <http://web.english.ufl.edu/english. ufl.edu/english/exemplaria/danefram.htm>

Ibid.

Ibid.: When a footnote refers to exactly the same source as the footnote immediately preceding it, Ibid. is used. It means that the footnote refers to the same page of the same book by the same author

Ibid.

When ibid is followed by a page number, it means that the reference is still to the same book by the same author, but on another page

If the footnote refers to a different page of the same author referred to earlier in the text, you should put down the author’s name and the page number(s) instead of ibid