Your English Class :: Tips for Better Writing

Formatting the Paper

MLA Style

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has established and promoted a citation style used throughout the humanities. Instead of traditional footnotes and endnotes, it uses parenthetical citations such as (Mencken 328). Parenthetical citations should be as brief as possible. For example, to cite an entire book, just insert (Mencken) at the end of a sentence, or (Mencken 27) to refer to page 27. You can also omit the citation entirely if you’ve made the author and title clear in your writing and you are not citing any particular passage.

Complete information about each citation appears at the end of the research paper in a bibliography entitled Works Cited (see fig. 1). The purpose of parenthetical citations is to direct the reader to specific entries in the works-cited list, which like other bibliographies contains three necessary types of information: author, title, and publication data.

1. Formatting the Paper

The List of Works Cited

In an MLA-style research paper, the list of works cited is the only place a reader will find complete bibliographic information about the sources used in the writing of the paper. For that reason the list must be as complete and accurate as possible. In other words, the list of works cited is where you tell your readers what sources you used in your research and where exactly in those sources you found the material.

The list of works cited comes at the end of your paper and includes only the sources from which you quoted, paraphrased, summarized, or to which you made reference. Occasionally instructors will require a list of all the sources you consulted during your research, not just the ones you actually cited, in which case use the term Works Consulted. The MLA Handbook prefers the terms Works Cited or Works Consulted instead of the older Bibliography (“description of books”) since research papers today are likely to include many more types of media than just books.

What follows are some basic guidelines for preparing the list of works cited:

1. Paginate the list of works cited continuously with the rest of the essay. If the last page of your essay begins on page 7, begin your list of works cited on page 8 (see fig. 1).
2. Double-space the list of works cited, flush left with a hanging indent of one-half inch (see fig. 1).
3. Alphabetize the list of works cited by author. For anonymous works, alphabetize them by title instead. Ignore but do not delete articles: A, An, and The.
4. Works published independently are italicized: books, plays, long poems published as books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, journals, films, radio and television programs, Web sites, CDs, software, ballets, operas, paintings, and other works and artifacts that stand on their own.
5. List the medium of publication for every entry in the list of works cited. For example: Richardson, Robert D. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Print. Or: Schwarz, Benjamin. “California Dreamers.” TheAtlantic.com. July 2009. Web. 7 July 2009.
6. The guidelines in the MLA Handbook no longer recommend that URLs be included in the list of works cited unless requested by an instructor.
7. One of the biggest changes in the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook concerns how to cite Web pages whose data appear in other media. For example, you may need to give bibliographic information for a book scanned in for viewing on the Web or a film available both on DVD and as streaming video (see pp. 15–16).
8. When citing two or more works by the same author, give the name in the first entry only. For the second and subsequent entries, in place of the name, type three hyphens and a period before the title. The three hyphens act as a substitute for the author’s name (see p. 25).
9. Use appropriate abbreviations for publishers’ names (Scribner’s for Charles Scribner’s Sons). See the list of abbreviations on page 38.
10. Capitalize all significant words in titles and subtitles, ignoring the original capitalization. Unless they begin the title or subtitle, do not capitalize articles (a, an, the), prepositions (of, to, in, against), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet), and the to in infinitives (to run, to dance).
11. The titles of works published within other works are typically placed within quotation marks. These include articles, essays, stories, short poems, chapters, encyclopedia entries, sections of online documents, songs, and individual episodes of broadcast programs: “Ode to a Nightingale.”
12. Italicize a title that would normally be italicized when it appears within a title requiring quotation marks: “Buddhist Thought in Siddhartha.”
13. Enclose in single quotation marks a title requiring quotation marks when it appears inside another title that also requires quotation marks: “Ironic Reversal in Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening.’ ”
14. Italicized titles within italicized titles require no italics: Racism Denied: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as Mirror of Twain’s Beliefs.
15. Enclose in quotation marks a title normally requiring quotation marks when it appears within an italicized title: “The Purloined Letter” and Poe’s Invention of Form.
16. Titles of sacred works like the Bible and the Koran are not italicized, nor are the names of laws or other political documents (The Constitution of the United States).
17. The divisions of a work are not italicized (preface, introduction, foreword, act, scene, canto, section, etc.); nor are they capitalized when they occur in the text of the paper.

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