Featured: What Is MLA Format and How To Use It

MLA formatting is a type of formatting described by the Modern Language Association to cite sources in formal papers. The MLA formatting guide, updated yearly, is used around the globe to help students build credibility by citing their sources of information within their text and making a scholarly tribute to the author of the original works. It also protects from plagiarism and is most commonly seen when writing about humanities such as language and literature.

You can find students using MLA formatting in countries like Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and Canada, as well as the United States. The basic format requires that sources are cited in-text within parenthesis. This is placed right after text that uses an outside source as a reference. When using MLA formatting, anything you did not create or think of yourself should go into parentheses.

An example of in-text citations taken from the Purdue Online Writing Lab:
Romantic poetry is characterized by the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth 263).

Your in-text citations should be brief. Readers will be able to find full citations on your 'Works Cited' page, which should be included at the end of your paper. The in-text citation will only make sense to a reader once they have looked at your works cited page to see where the information came from. As you see in the example above, it only says the information comes from 'Wordsworth 263.' Using this information, readers will be able to check your Works Cited page for a piece written by Wordsworth. There they'll find the title of the book. '263' lets them know on which page that information can be found. There are other, uncommon ways to cite a source, but this seems to be the most used when writing in MLA format. You do not need to site a source if the information you are thinking of is of common thought, a typical metaphor or statement.

Besides the necessary parenthetical citation, MLA formatting does have a general format that should be followed. All pieces should be double spaced with a legible twelve-point font. Margins should be one inch wide. Page numbers should be in the upper-right corner, flush with the right margin, and a half-inch from the top. And the first lines of each paragraph should be indented a half-inch, which you can do by pressing the ‘tab’ key once.

The first page of a MLA formatted paper will look weird the first time you do it. The format calls for a lot of information you might not put in otherwise. There are four lines on the upper left corner that begin with your name, the second is your instructor’s name, the next line is what course you are taking, and the final line is for your date the paper is being turned in on, usually the due date. These four lines are also double-spaced and in standard capitalization. Your title is double spaced from the bottom of your heading and centered with no italics or underlining. It is especially important that you do not use the italics or underlining in a MLA formatted title. Please note that your date should be written in the format of day, month, and then year with no commas.

An example of the header taken from the Purdue Online Writing Lab:
Beth Caitlin
Professor Elaine Basset
English 106
3 August 2009

The element of footnotes, also referred to as endnotes, is not usually found in a MLA formatted paper. The guidelines to MLA do state that writers should avoid using footnotes to keep the attention of the paper on the written information itself instead of the description of something within the paper. An exception to the rule is that you are allowed to use a footnote in the biographical sense. You may refer your readers to a certain source to gain more insight on the information instead of providing the description like you would see in a normal footnote.

An example of biographical footnote use from the Purdue Online Writing Lab:
1. See Blackmur, especially chapters three and four, for an insightful analysis of this trend.

If you choose to include such footnotes, MLA recommends that you site all of your footnotes on a separate page much like you would do for a works cited page, but instead a ‘Notes’ page. Depending on which edition of MLA guidelines you decide to pick up, you may find that the book does or does not tell you how to format correctly when doing the footnotes. The sixth edition will tell you how to put your footnotes at the bottom of a page and the seventh edition will tell you nothing at all in the sense of how to format the information. Although both will tell you to cite it by number, in-text that would require a superscript, and in your notes page, it would be a regular number.

Your works cited page is a bit different to create and does look weird when you try it yourself. Like the paper’s title, you center and use standard capitalization for typing Works Cited but you do not italicize or put it in quotation marks. From there, make sure that your page numbers, usually with your first or last name, are still included on this page of work. A general guideline for MLA is to double-space everything, including your works cited page. But you do not skip between sources. The weird part of the works cited page occurs within the next tip. In every source entry you cite you let the first line of your entry stay in the normal one-inch margin with no indentation. But for every line after the first, you indent it five spaces and you should not tab for this one. This is referred to as the hanging indent.

In your source cite entry, you must have a basic medium for each entry. By medium, think of where you found your source; was it a book or a website? MLA does not require you, as the writer, to include a URL for a website that you gathered information from, but your professor or instructor might so double check with that person before not including it in your works cited page. An addition to MLA in 2009 states that for larger works you should italicize the title and for shorter works, you should put the title into quotations; the larger works may include books or magazine articles while shorter works are things like poems. And remember to cite using the last name of the author first and then their last name after a comma. Do not include titles or degrees, only their name which may be King, Martin Luther, Jr.

An example of a work cited from the Purdue Online Writing Lab:
Gowdy, John. "Avoiding Self-organized Extinction: Toward a Co-
Evolutionary Economics of Sustainability." International Journal of
Sustainable Development and World Ecology 14.1 (2007): 27-36.
Print.

Those are the basic guidelines when writing in MLA format. If you have any questions, you can find all of the information used in the Purdue Online Writing Lab website, or you can pick up a copy of the MLA guidelines from a library or bookstore. I hope you have found this helpful and I wish you luck in writing using MLA.

Thank you for reading.

Thanks to Audrey T. and harry styles for editing.