/lit/ - Literature » Thread #7297909

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Anonymous Thu 29 Oct 2015 09:43:27 No.7297909 View Reply Report Delete

Quoted By:

Dumb question, but I am having a surprisingly hard time finding the answer in book or online...

What do you do, when using MLA, when you are citing the same work repeatedly? Not even using direct quotes, but rather summarizing the information? It seems extremely clunky to have every single sentence in one or two paragraphs ending with something like (Smith 300). Is there any way to shorten this, or do you really have to put it at the end of every sentence?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 29 Oct 2015 09:46:41 No.7297922 Report Delete

Quoted By: >>7297948

Write footnotes?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 29 Oct 2015 09:57:20 No.7297948 Report Delete

Quoted By:

>>7297922
Hm.. but then wouldn't I have a ton of footnotes, all referring back to the same thing? Seems I'd be replacing a ton of parentheses with a bunch of numbers?

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 29 Oct 2015 10:02:50 No.7297960 Report Delete

Quoted By:

instead of using references explicitly mention the text before you start summarising

Anonymous

Anonymous Thu 29 Oct 2015 10:18:01 No.7297990 Report Delete

Quoted By:

Think about the function rather than the form. Like the spirit of the law rather than the letter. The citation is there to indicate to the reader where he should go if he wants to fact check your ass. A single citation is usually sufficient for that. When the opening sentence of a paragraph clearly indicates that you're about to talk about this dude's argument from Book X for the next 21 sentences, you can pretty much just cite "Book X, 218ff." or "Book X, 218-241" to indicate that all the information is there, except maybe direct quotes.

You don't have to cite every single sentence. I mean, you can if it's really technical and you are really dissecting an argument or bringing in specific points, but if you're talking generally about Miller's argument against Stevenson, you can just cite it once and then describe it.

In some situations I've done stuff in a footnote like "On the discussion which follows, see [list and description of the sources]."

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