MLA Citation Guide

To cite blog posts, tweets and YouTube videos, use the same principles you use in citing web sites, keeping in mind that your purpose is to enable readers to locate your sources. Provide the author's name, the title of the post in quotation marks, the title of the entire site in italics, the publisher, the URL (without the http:// or https://), and the date of access for blog posts and tweets. The date of access is important because web sites,and tweets are subject to change or deletion. Don't worry if some information is lacking. This is not unusual; just do the best you can.

Examples:

Citing a Blog Post

List the author, if known, followed by the title of the article, followed by the information shown above for the entire web site.

Basic Format

Author of the article (last name, first name). "Title of the Post." Title of the  site. Publisher, Date, URL.

Access Date.

What does a citation look like?

Kennedy, Alicia. "Pride of Patchogue."  Hazlit. Penguin Random House. 6 November, 2018, hazlitt.net/longreads

/pride-patchogue. Accessed 17 May, 2021.

Citing a Tweet

List the author by their Twitter handle. For more than one author, put et al after the first author. Include the author's full name in parentheses if available.Tweets do not have formal titles. For short tweets, MLA recommends using the full text of the tweet in quotation marks. You can truncate longer tweets using ellipsis (...). If you are citing a tweet with no text, you can simply provide a description of the tweet. List Twitter in italics as the name of source.

Basic Format

Author's Twitter handle (full name in parentheses)  "Full text of the tweet." Twitter. ,Date of tweet, URL.

What does a citation look like?

@jesmimi (Jesmyn Ward). "Pretty girls DO like trap music: Saturday Night is the business. (Just came on my shuffle play

and had to share.)." Twitter, 12 Feb. 2021, twitter.com/jesmimi/status/1360288712425431041.

Citing a YouTube Video

Use the same title that appears in the uploaded YouTube version, regardless of whether it differs from the original work. Unless the the uploader (an individual or company) is identical to the creator of the work, you should cite both of them.

Note that these same principles apply to citing videos from other video-sharing platforms as well as YouTubes.

Basic Format

Author of the original work.  "Title." YouTube, uploaded by Name of Uploader (not inverted), Date of upload, URL.

What does a citation look like?

Miller, Arthur. "The Crucible." YouTube, uploaded by Disney, 1 April 2021, youtu.be/BLYIxQ1hi-E.

Citing AI Generated Content

A Word of Caution

Do NOT simply assume that the sources cited in content created by AI technologies are legitimate. Sometimes the sources look like legitimate sources in that they have all the elements of a citation, but they do not actually exist. Be sure to check any source that is used to support a claim or argument.

Bear in mind that the technology is still very new and there are likely to be inconsistencies in the way citations are rendered. Always remember that your primary goal in citing is to make it easy for your reader to locate your source.

Basic Format

MLA 8 was designed to be general enough to be applicable to any type of source. Note certain features that distinguish AI citations from others. See the template from the MLA style site: https://style.mla.org/citing-generative-ai/

Author - MLA does NOT recommend using the name of the AI tool as an author.  Title Describe what was generated by the AI tool. This may be the prompt you used. Title of the AI Tool (e.g., OpenAI). Publisher (the name of the company that created the AI tool). Date (when the content was generated).URL for the tool.

What does a citation look like?

“Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald” prompt. ChatGPT,

13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.