Frequently Asked Questions about Citing Sources in MLA Format

You should cite a post on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, or other social media using the same format of core elements that you use for other sources. In this case, the “author” is the author of the post, with their handle (if it is different from their name) in parentheses. The title is the first part of the post (if text) or a description of the image (if the post is an image). The container is the platform (X, Instagram, or another social media platform). The location is the URL, and the date is the date posted rather than the date accessed.

Example

Kayyem, Juliette. “A school district police department that did not need to exist should never exist again.” Twitter, 7 Oct. 2022, https://twitter.com/juliettekayyem/status/1578447720720699392.

When citing a podcast, the narrator or host should be listed in the author position, and the title of the episode should be listed as the title. The title of the whole podcast is the “container,” followed by season and episode numbers. You should then provide either the date of the podcast or the copyright date of the website, followed by the URL.

Nancy Updike, narrator. “Black Box.” We Were Three, episode 1, 13 Oct. 2022, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-were-three/id1648534112.

If the source has no page numbers, then you should not include any in your citations. Don’t count the pages yourself and number them since a reader may print or view the document differently, and this will create confusion.

You should avoid citing a source you have not consulted. If you can consult the original source in which the quotation appeared, then you should do that. If you cannot consult the original source, you should cite the source where you found the quotation. When you are citing a quotation that was quoted in someone else’s book, you should indicate this in the following way:

Author Amy Bloom described her husband’s early symptoms of Alzheimer’s as “names disappearing, repetition, information turned upside down, appointments and medications scrambled” (qtd. in Van Booy).