How should I cite my sources? How do I cite this particular [unusual] source?

First and foremost, the key to source citation is all about innovation: click through here for much more on that subject.

Classes in the English Department generally require students to use MLA citation standards; every student should have access to a style guide published within five years of when you started university, with guidelines on how to cite.

But the MLA guide only goes so far. Citation is all about clarity, consistency, and cleanliness. Indeed, in my classes, I look for clarity, consistency, and cleanliness more than for technical adherence to any style sheet (and I don’t require one style guide over another).

The trick to citation is to think first about why you are citing, not only how to cite (again, see that link above!). After some thought, you’ll inevitably (hopefully?) come up with some answers:

1. I cite because it is ethical to give due credit to any source I consulted in composing my work, because to do otherwise would be to simultaneously lie and steal.

2. I cite because I am participating in a conversation, and in order for my readers to respond to my ideas, my reader must be able to trace each of my points to its source. If I am building off of someone else’s point, but my reader disagrees with that initial point, then the reader must take up a debate with my source, not with me—my citations provide a roadmap to allow that to happen.

3. I cite because I need to make my own innovations fully clear to the reader—if my reader can’t easily and readily tell the difference between my work and someone else’s, then it will be impossible to show what new material and new thinking that I am contributing.

4. I cite because it is a mark of the organization, maturity, and professionalism of my thought process— without which the authority of my writing will necessarily be compromised.

On clarity: because of #1 and #2, your citations must be clear enough in every case to allow a reader to find exactly where you got your information. Editions vary surprisingly widely—so if I want to follow up, I need to know everything necessary in order to look at exactly the thing you were looking at: author, title, chapter, edition, publishing house, publishing location, year, page, whether it’s online, what online site to look through, and so forth, as applicable. Because of #1, #2, and #3, you must also include enough information in the text of your writing to make clear to your reader when to look something up in the first place—every new sentence requires full citation apparatus, enough to make absolutely clear where to start looking.

On consistency: #1, #2, and #3 can’t work if your reader doesn’t understand how you’re citing. If you switch up even the smallest convention in your citation system midstream, then we start getting very confused. But really, #4 is what makes it utterly important to use a clean, consistent, and thorough system of citation. If it looks sloppy, we simply won’t believe you, and rightly so.

On cleanliness: proofread your citations!  Triple-check that they are clear, consistent, and free of errors and omissions!

Unusual sources are thus your job to figure out. In the twenty-first century, more and more of our sources simply don’t fit into any style guide—the formats are changing too quickly for the MLA to keep up! So it’s your responsibility, as scholar, to use your knowledge of how citation works—to adapt your system in a way that maintains clarity and consistency. Create a citation for your unusual source, and then ask questions #1-#4. If it works, then you’ve solved the problem as far as I’m concerned.