Your English Class

Placement of Parenthetical Citations

For the sake of readability, the MLA Handbook recommends placing parenthetical citations at the end of sentences before the final period. Notice too that there is no punctuation between the author’s name and the page number.

In The Great Gatsby the romantic relationships put on display “a pattern of behavior grounded in the characters’ fear of intimacy, the unconscious conviction that emotional ties to another human being will result in one’s being emotionally devastated” (Tyson 39).

Occasionally you may want to place the parenthetical citation within your sentence to make the quotation a more integral part of your flow of words.

Tyson suggests that “the interest created by the romance between Gatsby and Daisy lies not in its apparent uniqueness” (39) but in the way it reflects all the dysfunctional relationships in the novel.

If a quotation extends to more than four lines, set it off from the rest of the text with an additional one-inch left margin and place the parenthetical reference after the final period.

Lois Tyson’s description of the dysfunctional characters in The Great Gatsby establishes that their entanglements drive the plot forward:

For a psychoanalytic reading, however, the interest created by the romance between Gatsby and Daisy lies not in its apparent uniqueness but in the ways in which it mirrors all the less appealing romantic relationships depicted—those between Tom and Daisy, Tom and Myrtle, Myrtle and George, and Nick and Jordan—and thereby reveals a pattern of psychological behavior responsible for a good deal of the narrative progression. (39)

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

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