MLA Format | Complete Guidelines & Free Template,Sample Papers in MLA Style
WebMLA Formatting and Style Guide; MLA General Format MLA Formatting and Style Guide; MLA In-Text Citations: The Basics; MLA Formatting Lists MLA Formatting Quotations; WebAuthor. Begin the entry with the author’s last name, followed by a comma and the rest of the name, as presented in the Title of source. The title of the source should follow the WebHeader in upper right with name and page number: Jones 1 Line Spacing – double throughout Tab in the first line of a paragraph ½” or.5 Heading in upper left Title ... read more
Blank and general. Business cards. Business plans. College tools. Family activities. Fax covers. Financial management. Food and nutrition. Fun and games. Health and fitness. Home learning. Papers and reports. Photo albums. Planners and trackers. Profit and loss. Resumes and cover letters. After the MLA header, press ENTER once and type your paper title. Read our article on writing strong titles that are informative, striking and appropriate. At the top of every page, including the first page, you need to include your last name and the page number. The Works Cited list is included on a separate page at the end of your paper. You list all the sources you referenced in your paper in alphabetical order.
After the title, press ENTER once and insert your MLA references. If a reference entry is longer than one line, each line after the first should be indented ½ inch called a hanging indent. All entries are double spaced, just like the rest of the text. All you need is the website URL, book ISBN, or journal article DOI, and the citation generator does the rest. Generate accurate MLA citations with Scribbr Webpage Book Video Journal article Online news article Cite The Scribbr Citation Generator will automatically create a flawless MLA citation. Prefer to cite your sources manually? Use the interactive example below to see what the Works Cited entry and MLA in-text citation look like for different source types.
Headings and subheadings are not mandatory, but they can help you organize and structure your paper, especially in longer assignments. We recommend keeping the font and size the same as the body text and applying title case capitalization. In general, boldface indicates greater prominence, while italics are appropriate for subordinate headings. Tip: Both Google Docs and Microsoft Word allow you to create heading levels that help you to keep your headings consistent. MLA also provides guidelines for presenting them.
Tables are labeled and numbered, along with a descriptive title. The label and title are placed above the table on separate lines; the label and number appear in bold. Below this, any explanatory notes appear, marked on the relevant part of the table with a superscript letter. The first line of each note is indented; your word processor should apply this formatting automatically. Just like in the rest of the paper, the text is double spaced and you should use title case capitalization for the title but not for the caption or notes. The caption in this case is also centered. The rest of the caption gives either full source information, or as in the example here just basic descriptive information about the image author, title, publication year.
Give full source information in a caption in the same format as you would in the Works Cited list, but without inverting the author name i. John Smith, not Smith, John. But if the caption just gives basic information like the figure example above , you do need to include a Works Cited entry for that source. In this case, make sure the caption contains at least enough information—author and abbreviated title—to point the reader to the relevant Works Cited entry. Frequently asked questions about MLA format What font and size is used in MLA format? Other standard fonts such as Arial or Georgia are also acceptable.
If in doubt, check with your supervisor which font you should be using. The main guidelines for formatting a paper in MLA style are as follows:. Search by book title, page URL, or journal DOI to automatically generate flawless citations, or cite manually using the simple citation forms. This quick guide to MLA style explains the latest guidelines for citing sources and formatting papers according to MLA. Usually, no title page is needed in an MLA paper. A header is generally included at the top of the first page instead.
Note for Purdue Students: Schedule a consultation at the on-campus writing lab to get more in-depth writing help from one of our tutors. This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use. MLA Modern Language Association style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook 9 th ed. Guidelines for referring to the works of others in your text using MLA style are covered throughout the MLA Handbook and in chapter 7 of the MLA Style Manual.
Both books provide extensive examples, so it's a good idea to consult them if you want to become even more familiar with MLA guidelines or if you have a particular reference question. In MLA Style, referring to the works of others in your text is done using parenthetical citations. This method involves providing relevant source information in parentheses whenever a sentence uses a quotation or paraphrase. Usually, the simplest way to do this is to put all of the source information in parentheses at the end of the sentence i. However, as the examples below will illustrate, there are situations where it makes sense to put the parenthetical elsewhere in the sentence, or even to leave information out.
MLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number s from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number s should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence. For example:. Both citations in the examples above, and Wordsworth , tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page of a work by an author named Wordsworth.
If readers want more information about this source, they can turn to the Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:. These examples must correspond to an entry that begins with Burke, which will be the first thing that appears on the left-hand margin of an entry on the Works Cited page:. Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. University of California Press, When a source has a corporate author, it is acceptable to use the name of the corporation followed by the page number for the in-text citation. You should also use abbreviations e. If a source uses a labeling or numbering system other than page numbers, such as a script or poetry, precede the citation with said label. The speaker makes an ardent call for the exploration of the connection between the violence of nature and the divinity of creation.
When a source has no known author, use a shortened title of the work instead of an author name, following these guidelines. Place the title in quotation marks if it's a short work such as an article or italicize it if it's a longer work e. plays, books, television shows, entire Web sites and provide a page number if it is available. Titles longer than a standard noun phrase should be shortened into a noun phrase by excluding articles. For example, To the Lighthouse would be shortened to Lighthouse. If the title cannot be easily shortened into a noun phrase, the title should be cut after the first clause, phrase, or punctuation:. In this example, since the reader does not know the author of the article, an abbreviated title appears in the parenthetical citation, and the full title of the article appears first at the left-hand margin of its respective entry on the Works Cited page.
Thus, the writer includes the title in quotation marks as the signal phrase in the parenthetical citation in order to lead the reader directly to the source on the Works Cited page. The Works Cited entry appears as follows:. Accessed 23 Mar. If the title of the work begins with a quotation mark, such as a title that refers to another work, that quote or quoted title can be used as the shortened title. The single quotation marks must be included in the parenthetical, rather than the double quotation. Parenthetical citations and Works Cited pages, used in conjunction, allow readers to know which sources you consulted in writing your essay, so that they can either verify your interpretation of the sources or use them in their own scholarly work. Page numbers are always required, but additional citation information can help literary scholars, who may have a different edition of a classic work, like Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto.
In such cases, give the page number of your edition making sure the edition is listed in your Works Cited page, of course followed by a semicolon, and then the appropriate abbreviations for volume vol. When you cite a work that appears inside a larger source for instance, an article in a periodical or an essay in a collection , cite the author of the internal source i. For example, to cite Albert Einstein's article "A Brief Outline of the Theory of Relativity," which was published in Nature in , you might write something like this:. See also our page on documenting periodicals in the Works Cited.
Sometimes more information is necessary to identify the source from which a quotation is taken. For instance, if two or more authors have the same last name, provide both authors' first initials or even the authors' full name if different authors share initials in your citation. Best, David, and Sharon Marcus. JSTOR, doi Franck, Caroline, et al. If you cite more than one work by an author, include a shortened title for the particular work from which you are quoting to distinguish it from the others. Put short titles of books in italics and short titles of articles in quotation marks. Additionally, if the author's name is not mentioned in the sentence, format your citation with the author's name followed by a comma, followed by a shortened title of the work, and, when appropriate, the page number s :.
If you cite from different volumes of a multivolume work, always include the volume number followed by a colon. Put a space after the colon, then provide the page number s. If you only cite from one volume, provide only the page number in parentheses. In your first parenthetical citation, you want to make clear which Bible you're using and underline or italicize the title , as each version varies in its translation, followed by book do not italicize or underline , chapter, and verse. Sometimes you may have to use an indirect source. An indirect source is a source cited within another source.
For such indirect quotations, use "qtd. in" to indicate the source you actually consulted. Note that, in most cases, a responsible researcher will attempt to find the original source, rather than citing an indirect source. Sources that take the form of a dialogue involving two or more participants have special guidelines for their quotation and citation. Each line of dialogue should begin with the speaker's name written in all capitals and indented half an inch. A period follows the name e. After the period, write the dialogue. Each successive line after the first should receive an additional indentation. When another person begins speaking, start a new line with that person's name indented only half an inch. Repeat this pattern each time the speaker changes.
You can include stage directions in the quote if they appear in the original source. Conclude with a parenthetical that explains where to find the excerpt in the source. Pleadingly Give me a drink, Rocky. Harry said it was all right. God, I need a drink. Avidly Thanks. He takes the bottle with both twitching hands and tilts it to his lips and gulps down the whiskey in big swallows. With more and more scholarly work published on the Internet, you may have to cite sources you found in digital environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work reference the OWL's Evaluating Sources of Information resource , some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source on your Works Cited page.
Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers. However, these sorts of entries often do not require a page number in the parenthetical citation. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:. Herzog, Werner, dir. Klaus Kinski. Filmverlag der Autoren, Yates, Jane. In the first example an online magazine article , the writer has chosen not to include the author name in-text; however, two entries from the same author appear in the Works Cited. If the title of the article was not named in the sentence, an abbreviated version would appear in a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence.
Both corresponding Works Cited entries are as follows:. Taylor, Rumsey. Accessed 29 Sep. Accessed 2 April To cite multiple sources in the same parenthetical reference, separate the citations by a semi-colon:. When creating in-text citations for media that has a runtime, such as a movie or podcast, include the range of hours, minutes and seconds you plan to reference. For example: Common sense and ethics should determine your need for documenting sources. You do not need to give sources for familiar proverbs, well-known quotations, or common knowledge For example, it is expected that U.
citizens know that George Washington was the first President.
MLA style paper,More templates like this
WebHeader in upper right with name and page number: Jones 1 Line Spacing – double throughout Tab in the first line of a paragraph ½” or.5 Heading in upper left Title WebMLA Formatting and Style Guide; MLA General Format MLA Formatting and Style Guide; MLA In-Text Citations: The Basics; MLA Formatting Lists MLA Formatting Quotations; WebAuthor. Begin the entry with the author’s last name, followed by a comma and the rest of the name, as presented in the Title of source. The title of the source should follow the ... read more
You may also want to investigate whether a third-party organization has provided directions for how to cite this kind of source. You can find her here on Twitter. Here are a few examples of in-text citations for sources with different numbers or types of authors:. Woolf, Virginia. It is one of the most commonly used academic style guides. According to Franck et al. It is acceptable to use another standard size, such as point or
Once again, these specific abbreviations can only be used on your Works Cited page. If you have a fascinating story to tell about your own life, you may feel daunted by. When a source has a corporate author, it is acceptable to use the name of the corporation followed by the page number for the in-text citation. In the very first scene, O'Neill's characters treat alcohol as a panacea for their ills:, proper mla format essay. The Works Cited entry appears as follows:. Here is an example of how a list may look incorporated into the proper mla format essay of a research project or assignment:.
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