Gather all relevant publication material from each textbook or textbook section you want to cite. Include author(s), editor(s), book title, edition, chapter or section title, page numbers, publisher, publishing city and publishing year.
Construct your Works Cited list one citation at a time. Start with the author of the textbook section (if different from the author of the whole book), listing her last name first.
Type the title of the section in quotation marks. Do this whether the section is a poem, story, chapter, part of a chapter or any other material included in the textbook. If the section of writing you choose to cite is a re-print from a previous publication, include the original publication date after the title. For example, here is the beginning part of a citation for a poem that was reprinted in an anthology textbook:
Brooks, Gwendolyn. "The Lovers of the Poor." 1991.
List the title of the textbook, the editor or editors of the textbook (if different from the section author), the publishing information and the pages cited in that order. End with the word "Print" unless you use a web-based textbook, in which case write your citation as you would a print textbook but end the citation with the word "Web" instead of "Print." Below are two complete examples; one is the full citation for the Brooks poem reprinted in a textbook, and the other is a citation of a chapter from a single-author textbook. Italicize textbook titles in your final citations. Cite any piece of writing from a textbook in this fashion to conform with MLA style:
Brooks, Gwendolyn. "The Lovers of the Poor." 1991. Contemporary American Poetry. Ed. A. Poulin and Michael Waters. 7th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 68-71. Print.
Chang, Kang-Tsung. "Geometric Transformation." Introduction to Geographic Information Systems. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Science Engineering, 2008. 120-35. Print.
Alphabetize your citations by the last name of the first listed author. Justify the first line of each citation at the left margin and indent each subsequent line one tab length.
Insert in-text citations into your essay as you would for other MLA sources, using the last name of the author listed first in your citation and the relevant page number. For example, an in-text citation for Chang may look like this:
It is fascinating that geometric transformation also "applies to satellite images" (Chang 120).