 Welcome to the Help Anytime video on in-text citations in MLA style 8th edition. In the previous videos in this series, you learned about why it's important to cite your sources and about the basics of formatting those citations for your work cited page. This video will focus on creating in-text citations, a necessary component of citing sources and avoiding plagiarism. The in-text citation is where you pause in your writing to point to the source and sometimes a page number within a source, where you pulled the particular idea or quote you've just included in your work. This includes direct quotes as well as paraphrases and summaries. You include this in-text citation within the sentence or at the very end of the sentence where you reference the work. If you refer to the same work later in your writing, you'll again include an in-text citation. Without the in-text citations to go with the full citations, your reader would have a vague idea that some of the ideas and words in your work are from your sources, but they wouldn't know which ideas came from which source. In preparing to build your in-text citations, you'll find it less confusing if you adopt these helpful and time-saving practices as you're drafting. The first good practice goes back to your work cited list. You should begin building your work cited list as you start selecting sources for your research. As you're searching, reading, and collecting potential resources, if you think you're likely to include a source in your paper, make or copy the citation and save it to a document just for tracking your research. The second necessary practice is to include your in-text citations in your notes as soon as you begin copying quotes and ideas. After each quote, paraphrase, or summary from a source, add parentheses with the source and page number it came from. These two simple practices will make citing sources much easier and less stressful. Including the in-text citation in your writing is a simple process. It pulls information directly from the full citation on your work cited page using the first word of your full citation as a shortened reference. The process will look something like this. You're writing along and decide you want to include a quotation, a paraphrase, or a summary from one of your sources. If you include a signal phrase to introduce the quote, part of the in-text citation will be included as the author's last name. In this example, with two authors, the signal phrase includes both of the author's last names as found in the full citation from the work cited list. Since this is a book with page numbers, you will also include the page number and parentheses, but that will go after the quote. Pay attention to the punctuation here too. Right after the quotation mark and a space, you type a beginning parentheses, then the page number where you found the quote, the closing parentheses, then a period. Notice that you don't include the author's names in the parentheses because they are already in the sentence containing the quote. Author names go either in the signal phrase or in the parentheses, not in both places. In cases where you don't use a signal phrase to introduce the source content, the author's last name and the page number will go in the parentheses at the end of the sentence as shown in this example. In this case, there were three or more authors, so the notation at all is used in the in-text citation just as it was in the full citation. Let's look at another example. Because websites and some other publications don't provide page numbers, this part of the in-text citation is simply left out. This example also shows what to do if the author is a government department rather than an individual. The department is considered to be the author, so it is included in your in-text citation, either in the signal phrase as shown here or in parentheses. If there is no author given for your source, use a shortened version of the title in your in-text citation and exclude any initial articles. Use your judgment in deciding how many words of the title you need to be clear with your readers. Often just one or two words is enough. Titles in your signal phrase or in parentheses still need quotation marks or italics, the same as they have in your works cited entry. For more help and more examples of in-text citations, see the Purdue OWL or the Kirkwood Library MLA guide. Just remember, if you keep track of your sources and where each idea or quotation came from, you'll be saving yourself from scrambling to do all that work at the end and risk confusing yourself and your readers about where your information came from.