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Last updated July 10, 2007

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Using Parenthetical Citation

You may read about parenthetical citations in our style manual, Essential Handbook for Writers pages 142-146.

The Purpose of Parenthetical Citations: To allow you to give credit to your source within the research paper itself instead of relying on endnotes or footnotes.

The Process for Creating Parenthetical Citations

• Insert the appropriate source information (usually author and page number) in parentheses after the words or ideas borrowed from another source.
• Place them where a pause would naturally occur (usually at the end of a sentence) to avoid disrupting the flow of your writing.
• Make sure all of your sources are listed in the Works Cited section of your paper.
• For correct form, use the rule of Quo-Par-Punc to remember the order of punctuation: first comes the quotation marks, then the parenthetical citation, followed by the final punctuation.

YES: As President Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "Arrrghhh!" (Spear 809). NO: As the historian Denise Money in her book Give Me the Free Market or Give Me Hell observed, "Give me the free market or give me hell (213)."

 

Unfortunately, Writers Inc does not cover all cases for parenthetical citations so here are some additional RULES OF THUMB for PARENTHETICAL CITATIONS:

• Attempt to use as few words as possible in the citation. Ideally, you only use the author's or editor's last name and a page number. No comma in-between.
• If you are citing a website, use only the author's last name or the organization's name. If the website doesn't have an author and you still decide (with your teacher's blessing) to use it, use part of the title with an ellipsis (or the full title if it is short). Do not put URLs into a parenthetical citation!
• Always offer in your parenthetical citation the piece of information that makes it easiest to find the source in your Works Cited (i.e. something from the very beginning of the entry). Thus, with general reference citations, you might actually want to use the item that you looked up (for example, "Chaplin, Charlie"), followed by the reference work only if you looked up the same item in more than one reference work.
• Introduce a new parenthetical citation every time you change the author, and even the page, from which you take a document. Thus, one sentence in your paper might be followed by the parenthetical citation (Dribble 102), and the next sentence might be followed by the citation (Dribble 77). Perhaps, the sentence after that might be (Snoot 16), followed by three sentences all taken from (Ludcake 88-91).
• Strive for elegant quotation integration. You don't ever want to just plop a "naked quotation" down in the middle of a paragraph without some type of introduction.

 

 

About These Guidelines:

 

These guidelines were originally created as handouts by

Nancy Feidelman for her History 9 class.

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