• The purpose of documentation is to guide the reader of your paper to the sources you used.

• You must document all information that you take from a source whether it is summarized, paraphrased, or quoted.

• Whenever you use a source, you must give a parenthetical citation for it in the body of your paper.

• The information that you give in the parenthesis will lead your reader to complete information for the publication on your works cited list.

• It is often necessary to combine elements of different works cited models to make a correct works cited entry for a particular publication.

• A basic principle in the MLA documentation style is economy -- Give essential information only and do not repeat information unnecessarily.

• Documentation models and explanations are given in Chapter 37 of your Little Brown Handbook.

Plato. "The Myth of the Cave." Buscemi and Smith. 351-355.

Rodriguez, Richard. "Bilingual Education: Outdated and Unrealistic." 441-444.

When you are using several works from the same anthology do this:

• For the first item in your alphabetized list, give complete bibliographic information on the book. This is done for the essay by George Orwell.

• For other works from the same anthology, give only the author of the essay, story, or poem; the title; the names of the editors of the anthology; and finally the inclusive page numbers for the essay, story or poem you used.

• The names of the editors connects the abbreviated citation to the the complete one.

Chopin, Kate. "Ripe Figs." Literature for Composition." Ed. Sylvan Barnet et al. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2000. 3-4.

Lam, Andrew. "Goodbye, Saigon, Finally." Sylvan Barnet et al. 1043-1045.

Munro, Alice. "Boys and Girls." Sylvan Barnet et al. 714-723.

• What is different here is the reference to the editors of the book. Because, there are so many of them, you do not want to write out all the names, so you give the name that appears first and then use the abbreviation "et al" which means "and others."