A citation style is a uniform and reliable method of guiding readers to the sources of information referenced in a piece of writing. You need to cite your sources whenever you borrow phrases, ideas, arguments, images, etc. from someone. When we use citation, we give credit to the original ideas that influenced, inspired, or guided our own original work.
Citations help your reader. Within the body of your paper, you will use in-text citations to reference the original source. This basically plants a flag your reader can follow to find the full information about your source. The reader finds this information at the end of your paper in a list of reference. In MLA Style, this list is called the works cited. The works cited list goes on a separate page at the end of the paper.
This work by Northwest Arkansas Community College, Pauline Whitaker Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This guide has been adapted for Central Alabama Community College.