Exercise: In-text Citations (MLA)

Look at the sentences below, each of which contains an incorrectly formatted in-text citation. Specify the error made in each sentence; then, write a new sentence in which the in-text citation is correctly formatted.

1. The parlor metaphor of writing describes writing as entering into a conversation, as in arriving late and a parlor and talking to guests who have been there long before you have (7).

2. In “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love,” Jim Corder explains that “Everyone is an argument.” (1)

3. David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day takes place at a school in Paris (Sedaris 1).

4. The opening lines of the novel are “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” (Nabokov, 1).

5. The opening lines of the novel are “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” (Lolita 1).