At the beginning of the semester, my instructor often referred to using “in text citations” within our essays and I had no idea what that meant. I asked one of my high school English teachers and I still was not able to grasp this concept of how to cite inside of my papers. After reading more in the textbook about citations and using Purdue Owl, I was able to properly cite the information I had found and used in my essays. Now, when looking back at my first paper using citations, Module 5, and the last paper which I have used them in, Module 10, I can see a tremendous improvement. Over the course of this semester, I have learned how to appropriately compose and use citations in MLA format.
In my first paper, I was still confused as to how to properly cite my work. The narrative essay about three major world events was the first time I had used in text citations and I was not sure if I was using them correctly. As I know what I am now doing with citations, I can see I was citing completely wrong. Specifically,
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While writing my volunteer essay, I cited wrong in my rough draft, but was able to correct those problems in my final essay. My first mistake was only citing the word “The” instead of citing “The Salvation Army – Volunteering”. Obviously my first citation was extremely too short and could not even carry the name citation. I then used the correct citation, from the website Feeding America, for information I used within my paper. My final citation was when I tried to cite a verse from the bible. I cited the book of the verse used, Mathew, instead of the translation I quoted it from, The Message (The Army Behind The Army 2). Throughout this volunteer essay I had some citations correct while others were completely wrong. Towards the end of the semester, I was able to completely understand in text citations and correctly use them in my