MLA: citing when no parenthetical citation is needed

ekimball99
In MLA style, one frequently has no need for a parenthetical citation. The sentence itself makes reference to an article, and there's no need to cite the year or a page number. So how can I insert a reference so that it will appear in the Works Cited? If I insert a citation and then edit it, once I delete the parenetheses, the whole coding is gone with it.
  • adamsmith
    how would that look in the text?
  • ekimball99
    Here's an example from the piece I'm working on now:
    The _Construyendo Puentes_ collection also does a great deal of the important work of introducing the Deweyan philosophy to the field; notable essays include those by Aileen Hale, Varas, and Baldwin et al.

    Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    I don't think we have a good way of dealing with that. We wouldn't want invisible citations in the text, as those can cause all types of problems.

    So my suggestion would be to add items cited this way to the bibliography using "Edit bibliography"

    That said:
    If I insert a citation and then edit it, once I delete the parenetheses, the whole coding is gone with it.
    this shouldn't be the case. Could you describe this in a bit more detail? Also, which word processor?
  • ekimball99
    Oh, I didn't realize I could edit the biblio this way. That's a good work around.

    As for the parentheses disappearing, what I mean is that I would enter the citation, and it appears in parentheses. Then I would try to delete the parentheses but keep the author's name there as part of my text --but when I did so, the entire citation would get highlighted and then disappear completely when I hit delete. As long as you do it within the parentheses, you can do any editing you want, but you can't get rid of the parentheses!

    Anyway it's a moot point now so I will proceed with your suggestion. Thanks!
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