MLA Style: Basics

The example above is for the chapter titled "Disabling Postcolonialism: Global Disability Cultures and Democratic Criticism" by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray in the anthology The Disability Studies Reader. Anthologies are a common type of scholarly book where chapters are written by different people and an editor or a team or editors oversees the project. Generally, we're interested in a chapter or two from the work.

We're citing a chapter, so we begin our citation with the names of the chapter authors. We include them in the order they are listed in the source, inverting the first author's name, including a comma and the word and, then the second author's first name, then surname and a period. Next, we include the name of the chapter in title case enclosed in quotation marks. This work is inside two containers.

The first container is the book is was published in, The Disability Studies Reader. We've included the title of the book here, italicized it and followed it with a comma. Next, we include the words edited by and the editor's name. We also include 4th ed., because the edition number is noted on the title page.  Then, we include the name of the publisher, Routledge, italicized and a comma. Finally we include the date of publication, a comma, the abbreviation for page: pp. and the page range in the book where the chapter appears, and a period.

The second container is the database where we found the poem. We've included the name of the database, eBook Central, italicized and followed by a comma. Then, we included the permanent or stable URL for the item in the database. If you were looking at a print version of this book, the information about the database as a container wouldn't apply.

Several possible container core elements weren't relevant to our source, so we omitted them. The complete citation gives readers specific information about which version of the work we're looking at and how we accessed it. Finally, we used a hanging indent and double spaced our citation.

The beauty of MLA's core elements citation method is that you have some flexibility when it comes to citing sources that don't fit neatly into the categories of sources we tend to cite. Applying this same method, we can cite videos on the internet, tweets, and other digital sources we haven't imagined yet, even if we don't have an example to guide us.

Let's talk through this citation. The account that uploaded the video is chescalocs. The creator isn't listed by name, but they do link to their website so we can discover their full name. I've included both their full name, reversed for alphabetizing, and their handle, as they are different. In some cases, you can't discover a creator's full name and in those cases it's okay to cite by a handle alone, but do take a few minutes to look around for this info. Next up is the title of the video in title case and enclosed in quotation marks.

Now, this source is in a single container, YouTube. The container title, date, and location URL are probably pretty familiar by now. I do want to talk a bit more about the contributor in this citation. From watching the video and exploring the description, it appears to me that Tracee Ellis Ross is a guest on this video, and while both women participated in the filming, the production responsibilities appear to fall to Franchesca Ramsey. For this reason, I've listed Franchesca as the sole author, and included Tracee Ellis Ross as a contributor. This is a situation where different people might interpret the source differently, and there's some wiggle room.