Editing Literary Research Papers
Once you complete major improvements to your research paper, you can focus on every word, letter, and punctuation mark. Editing helps you correct errors in punctuation, mechanics, spelling, grammar, and usage. You'll also want to make sure that you have correctly used Modern Language Association (MLA) style. The following activities will help you.
Editing In-Text Citations for MLA Style
Whenever you use ideas or direct quotations from others, you need to credit the source. You do so to show who originated an idea, to avoid plagiarism, and to allow readers to explore the same materials in their own research.
All credits begin with an in-text citation that names the source and page number (if there is one) and refers to a complete entry on the works-cited page. The simplest citation names the title and author in the text and provides the page number in parentheses after the borrowed material, before the period.
In "On Faerie Stories," Tolkien argues that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are not actually fantasy because they are framed by a dream. Everything in Wonderland is unreal, and the reader knows that it is. Also, Gulliver's Travels is not fantasy because the tiny people and giants Gulliver encounters are in the Primary World, simply removed by distance (5).