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English Composition 2

Paragraph on James Joyce's "Eveline" with Secondary Sources and MLA Documentation

Please read this page carefully: it brings together a lot of important information concerning the use, citation, and documentation of sources in an essay.

Below is a paragraph on James Joyce's short story "Eveline" that uses two secondary sources and that cites and documents material from both the story and from the secondary sources according to MLA standards.

Sample Paragraph

Eveline's dreary home life suggests that she has many reasons to leave with Frank. Her brother Ernest and her mother are dead, and her brother Harry is almost always away from home tending to his church decorating business, so Eveline has "nobody to protect her" from her father's violence (Joyce 3-4). Eveline used to play with other children in the neighborhood when she was young, but her father would "hunt [the children] in out of the field with his blackthorn stick" (Joyce 3). Lately, he has gotten worse, and Eveline even identifies her father as the source of her "palpitations" (Joyce 3). Eveline is already the victim of her father's emotional and psychological abuse, and now she expects to become a victim of physical abuse. She "always gave her entire wages" to her father; however, he accuses her of "squander[ing] the money" and refuses to give her his own "hard-earned money to throw about the streets" (Joyce 4). He often makes the accusations on a Saturday night, when he is "fairly bad" (Joyce 4), possibly from squandering the money himself on alcohol rather than spending it on necessities. An abusive father, a depressing environment, and many responsibilities make life difficult for Eveline. She has "hard work to keep the house together" (Joyce 4), with the deathbed promise to her mother binding Eveline to "the horrendous task of providing the glue that will hold together a crumbling family" (Paige 336). Eveline's responsilibities include acting as a mother for "the two young children who had been left to her charge" as she makes sure that they "went to school regularly and got their meals regularly" (Joyce 4). The narrator states directly that "It was hard work--a hard life" (Joyce 4). As Marilyn French notes, the story presents many examples "of the tedium, fear, unceasing labor, and constrictions of [Eveline's] life, to present a bleak picture" (452). It seems that Eveline's dreary existence should motivate her to leave her home and begin a new life with Frank, but Eveline is conflicted as the time approaches for her to depart with Frank.

The Works Cited Page for the Paragraph Above

Works Cited

French, Marilyn. "Missing Pieces in Joyce's Dubliners." Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 24, no. 4, 1978, pp. 443-72. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/441196.

Joyce, James. "Eveline." Literature and the Writing Process, edited by Elizabeth McMahan et al., 11th ed., Pearson, 2018, pp. 3-6.

Paige, Linda Rohrer. "James Joyce's Darkly Colored Portraits of 'Mother' in Dubliners." Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 3, no. 3, Summer 1995, pp. 329-40. ProQuest, https://ezproxy.ivcc.edu:2118/docview/195683404?accountid=39160.

The Use of Sources

Note that you should use insightful comments from secondary sources that help you develop your interpretation. Do not use material from a secondary source if it only summarizes something that happens or is said in the story or something that is obvious from the story itself.
Make sure that you understand completely the meaning of the information that you use from a source and that the meaning will be clear to readers.
Never take material from a source out of context. Material from a source in your essay must accurately reflect the meaning of the material as it is presented in the source.
Note the balance of supporting material from the primary sources (the story itself) and from the secondary sources. In general, there should be at least two or three quotations from the primary source (the story) for every quotation from a secondary source. The main source of supporting evidence should be the primary source.
If you copy more than just a few words in a row from a source, those words must go in quotation marks, and the source must be cited. Otherwise, plagiarism might occur.
If you paraphrase or summarize material from a source, that material must truly be in your own words. Never copy a sentence from a source, change a few words, and then present the information as if it is in your own words.
Quoted words must appear in an essay exactly as they appear in the original source, but material can be deleted from or changed in a quotation if the deletions are indicated with an ellipsis (. . .) and if material added or changed is indicated with [brackets]. For more information, see "Using Quotations Properly."
Be extra careful to avoid plagiarism. There must be a clear distinction between your words and ideas and the words and ideas from sources. For more information, see "Understanding and Avoiding Plagiarism."
Always integrate quotations into your own sentences: no quotation should stand alone in an essay. See "Integrating Quotations into Sentences" for more information.

The Citation of Sources

The page number is given in the citation for an online source only if the page numbers (or paragraph numbers) actually appear on the screen when you view the source. Never cite the page numbers that appear only on printed copies of a source.
Note how the source is cited if you have an author and a page number, "like this" (Paige 336).
Do not put punctuation between the author's last name and the page number.
Give only the author's last name in parentheses, never the author's full name.
If an author's name appears within your sentence (not in parentheses), you should give the full name the first time you refer to the author and just the last name each time thereafter.
Do not repeat the author's name in parentheses if the name appears within your sentence.
Give only the page number where the information you are using appears in the source.
Note the placement of punctuation and the spacing, "like this" (Paige 336).
Always put the period or the comma after the parenthetical citation, never in front of it.
Always include a space between the last quotation mark and the first parenthesis: "this is correct" (source); "this is incorrect"(source).
The citation of a source is the same if you quote, paraphrase, or summarize material from the source.

The Documentation of Sources on the Works Cited Page

The Works Cited page always begins at the top of a new page.
The works on the Works Cited page always are listed in alphabetical order, according to the author's last name (according to the title if no author is given.)
The Works Cited page always is double spaced, with no extra line spacing anywhere.
Titles of short works (essays, articles, short stories) go in quotation marks; the titles of long works (magazines, journals, books) are italicized.
Include the URL (or Web address) for an online source.
Follow the correct format for sources on the Works Cited page as explained on "Preparing a Works Cited Page."