My 1500-word sociology essay requires MLA in-text citations and I’m terrified of accidental plagiarism?

It is completely normal to feel anxious about citations, especially when returning to school after a long break, but you can definitely master these formatting rules before your deadline. The core of MLA style is simply giving credit where it is due, and the reason your professor is being so strict about page numbers is that they need to be able to verify your sources instantly. When you are citing a source with two authors, you should use the word and between their names, like Smith and Jones, followed by the page number. If you have three or more authors, you just list the first author’s name followed by et al., which is Latin for and others, and then the page number. It feels like a lot of moving parts, but once you get the rhythm of putting the author and page number in parentheses at the end of the sentence before the final period, it becomes second nature. Imagine you are writing a paragraph about social stratification and you decide to paraphrase a point made by two researchers, Miller and Davis, on page forty-two of their book. You would write your sentence and then end it with (Miller and Davis 42). If you were using a source with four authors, you would simply write (Miller et al. 42) instead. To feel more confident, try going through your draft specifically to check every single piece of evidence against your notes to ensure the page numbers match up perfectly. You might also want to read your essay aloud to see if the flow of your writing is interrupted by your citations, which can help you decide whether to integrate the author's name into the sentence itself to make the parenthetical citation shorter. Finally, double-check your works cited page to make sure every entry there has a corresponding citation in your text, as this is often where students accidentally lose points. You have plenty of time to polish this, so just take it one source at a time and you will be fine.