Which of the following direct quotes is correctly punctuated?

A. Private investigators should "obtain authorization forms and releases" to protect themselves from potential defamation lawsuits (Queen 12).

B. Private investigators should "obtain authorization forms and releases" to protect themselves from potential defamation lawsuits (Queen, 12).

C. Private investigators should "obtain authorization forms and releases" to protect themselves from potential defamation lawsuits (12).

D. According to David Queen, private investigators should "obtain authorization forms and releases" (David, 12).

A

Explanation:

According to the MLA in-text citation rules, the page number should not be set off from the author's name with a comma when both are included in the parenthetical citation. Answer B includes an unnecessary comma within the citation, so we can rule it out as a possible answer.

Unless the name of the source's author is incorporated into the sentence before the citation, you need to include their name in the citation. Basically, this is because the reader should be able to identify both the author of the source and the page number that the quote can be found on. Since answer C doesn't identify the author at all, we can also rule it out as a possible answer.

A is correct because it avoids the mistake of a comma within the citation in addition to including the author and page number.