How do you cite ebook quotations MLA style?
Posted Friday, May 7, 2010 by admin
I’m writing a critical analysis on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Unfortunately, the only copy at my library was missing quite a few pages, so I the bulk of my reading online. I have the bibliography’s citation made already, but I’m not sure how to properly cite a direct quote within the paper. It usually goes parentheses with author and page number. However, ebooks lack page numbers, My English teacher isn’t exactly sure how to cite ebook quotes either.
If electronic publications have no page number do the following:
Use a paragraph number if, and only if, this is specifically provided in the source, using par. or pars., eg. (Salinger ch. 5, par. 5). That is, do not do your own counting of paragraphs.
Otherwise, in the absence of page numbers, “cite the work in its entirety”, which literally would be parenthetically as (Salinger). However your whole paper is on the same “source” so doing this is redundant.
In text, not in parentheses, the Handbook says you can state something like “in the final third of his article, Jones argues….”
I would suggest for this rule you just use chapter location device in parenthesis such as (ch. 4) at the end of each paragraph of points you make. Or use a combo of in text description and parenthesis, something like “in the first half of chapter X Salinger introduces…..”, “by the end of the book he has developed it……(ch. 10)”. It won’t be very specific for your readers and this is expected.