How To Compose A Good Essay With Parenthetical Citations

Writing an essay with parenthetical citations is one of the easiest ways to put in text citations in your essay. The form that you will be learning today is MLA but there are other forms like APA and Chicago but they are similar, so this guide will help you with all of the general parenthetical citations. You need to ask your instructor what kind you need to use for your essay, but this will give you a general idea of how to do it.

How to do Parenthetical Citations

There are two ways that you can put in the citation with the author’s name. You can use the author’s name in a sentence and then include the page numbers in parentheticals or the author’s name and page numbers in parentheticals.
When doing two or more authors, you include all names in the parentheticals as well as the page number.
When there is no author, you include part of the title and the page number of the source that you are using.
When you are using multivolume work, you cite it with the name of the work as well as the volume number.
When you are citing a website, you simply use the name of the website in parentheticals.

These are the basic parentheticals that you will be using for most of the papers that you write, but if you can’t find the source that you need to cite on this list, then you can go online and find the right source for you. Parentheticals citations are very important because they are the proper way to cite your resources in your paper and if you find this list confusing there is even a simpler way to create these parentheticals.

If you go online and do a Google search of citations machine and the type of citations your need (APA, MLA, Chicago) it will bring up online software that will allow you to input all of the information and it will give you the in-text and reference page citations. This is the easiest way to get the citations you need but it is also a great idea to pick up a few books on the subject, preferably one of each (APA, MLA, Chicago) to keep on hand as reference because you can read them in your spare time and learn the right way to do them.