MLA style was developed by the Modern Languages Association. This association of language professionals, established in the late 1800s to promote the study and teaching of modern languages, like French, German, and Spanish, instead of old, dead ones, like Latin, started an academic journal in which to publish their studies. In 1931, a couple of the MLA members decided to put together a “style sheet”^[1] with a few rules about how to format papers submitted to their journal. Over the decades, that style sheet has become the 9th edition of a style handbook with 400 pages of rules, guidelines, examples, and tips.

Formatting

Early in the semester, there’s not a lot you need to do to properly format your paper to MLA style. Here’s a brief list of what you’ll have to remember:

Header

The header is a special space in your word processor. It’s located at the very top of every page, and you can’t type anything there without intentionally opening it up. In Google Docs, you can click Insert → Headers & footers → Header or you can double-click in the margin right at the top of the page. In Word, you can also click Insert → Header → Blank or just double click in the margin at the top of the page.

In MLA style, the header must have the author’s last name followed by the page number. The thing to keep in mind with headers, however, is that whatever you type up there will be repeated on every page exactly how it’s typed. So, if you type “1” for page 1, then every page will be page 1 because the header will repeat that for every page. If you go to page 2 and change the 1 to a 2, then every page will be page 2. So, instead of typing the page number, you need to once again click “Insert” and then “Page numbers”^[2] or “Page number.”^[3] A smart object will be inserted that displays the page you are actually on, which solves your page-numbering problem. It should look something like this:

Double spacing

In MLA format, the entire paper should be double spaced. The best time to do this is when you first open the paper and get ready to write so that you don’t have to think about it for the rest of the document. Every part of your paper, except for the header, must be double spaced, including the identifying information at the top of the page.

It’s fairly simple to double space in both Google Docs and Microsoft Word. In Google Docs, you can click Format → Line & paragraph spacing → Double. You can also click the “Line & paragraph spacing” button and select “Double” there, as well.

In Microsoft Word, click the Line and Paragraph Spacing button and select “2.0,” or you can just type “Ctrl + 2” on the keyboard. If you started typing your paper before double spacing, just make sure that you select the entire paper. In both Docs and Words, you can do this by typing “Ctrl + A” to select all before applying the double spacing.

Identifying information

At the top of the page, before you start your essay but also double spaced, you need to list four pieces of identifying information:

1. Your name – First and last name just as it appears on the course roster.
2. Your professor’s name – You can use your professor’s full name here. You could also write “Professor” or “Doctor”^[4] and their last name.
3. The course – Put the course name and number here. For this class, you’d put ENGL 1010 or ENGL 1010D. Don’t forget to add the section number. For example, if this were section 17 of ENGL 1010, you could write “ENGL 1010-17.”
4. The due date – Don’t just put the date of the day when you’re working on the paper. If there’s ever any confusion about which paper you’re submitting, your professor can use the due date to match your essay with the assignment that’s due that day. Also, MLA format requires that you write your date as either month day, year^[5] or day mon. year.^[6]

Title

Your title should be centered on the line immediately after the identifying information with no extra space added—just the normal double spacing. The title should be capitalized according to title case,^[7] and it should not be bold, italicized, or underlined. It should be exactly the same font and style as the rest of the paper.

Font & size

Surprisingly, MLA format does not require a particular font or size for its papers. It recommends that authors choose a legible font^[8] and size. While many instructors recommend using a 12-point font, that’s not a requirement.^[9]

Numbers

MLA format has guidelines for the writing of numbers within essays that follow its style guide. If you can write the number using one or two words, then write the number as words; for example, you’d write “twelve” and not “12,” and “one billion” instead of “1,000,000,000.” However, if you need more than two words to write the number, you can use numerals instead of words. So, you’d write “412” instead of “four hundred and twelve.” It doesn’t actually matter how big or small the quantity is; all that matters is how many words you’d use to write the number out.

Citations

One of the hallmarks of MLA style, given its roots in the humanities, is a focus on the author or creator of the source being used. With its focus on languages and the humanities, it doesn’t really matter how long ago someone painted a picture or wrote a book—what matters is who created it. This shows up in how the style asks writers to give credit to authors mentioned in the text, the parenthetical citations, and the full citations at the end of the paper.

Below, we’ll cover the absolute basics of the citation requirements for MLA style. Given the nearly infinite variety of combinations of authors, source types, and publication places, it’s quite likely that the examples below will not be sufficient to help you figure out the perfect citation for every single source you use in your writing. You will need to identify your own preferred resource to consult for all the deets when the basics just won’t cut it. I grew up using the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) and highly recommend it. However, there are a lot of excellent resources out there that you can find and figure out on your own.

In-text authors

One way that MLA’s focus on authors shows up is how they want you to handle authors the first time you mention them. While you will typically only use the author’s last name when you want to refer to them in your writing, this style asks that, the first time you mention them or use their name in the paper, you use their full first and last name as well as their credentials. They want you to help your reader understand why you are using that particular person’s words or ideas in your paper. Are they an expert in their field? Mention their position. Did they research some effect? Include that with their name. Do they have some kind of special experience that makes their views relevant to the discussion? Explain that to the reader.

Once you’ve mentioned the author’s entire name and credentials, then for the rest of the essay, you should just refer to them by their last name.

This changes a little when you have multiple authors for a single source. If there are two authors, you just use the authors’ last names in the text joined by the word “and.” When there are more than two authors, you use the first author’s last name followed by the Latin abbreviation “et al.”^[10]

In-text citations

Mentioning the author’s name and credentials is important, but it doesn’t really count in terms of properly documenting your sources and giving the author credit for their work. To do that, you must provide your reader with all of the information that they need in order to find the same exact source you used: the actual book, article, movie, website, and so on. If you included all of those details within the text of your paper, MLA articles would be messy and incredibly difficult to read. So, instead of putting all of the necessary information within the paper itself, MLA says that you should only put a limited amount of critical information within your writing that will direct the reader to all of the details gathered on the Works Cited page. For MLA style, you should only include the author’s last name (if you don’t mention it in the text of your writing) and the page number that your quote or paraphrase comes from in the original text. These in-text citations look something like this:

Again, when you have two authors, you handle things a little differently within a citation. Use the two authors’ last names combined with “and.” For three or more authors, we still use the abbreviation “et al.” after the first author’s name.

There are many guidelines about how to make these citations fit a wide variety of different situations,^[11] so once again, it’s important to find a good MLA resource that you can consult whenever you encounter a difficult source that doesn’t seem to follow the “normal” rules.

The most important thing to remember when crafting in-text citations is that they need to provide a direct link to the full citation at the end of the paper. The majority of those full citations will start with the author’s last name, as we discuss below, which is why the majority of in-text citations will start with the author’s last name, too. Whatever is included in the text is the only thing that readers will have to find the right citation on the Works Cited page, so it needs to be whatever is listed first in the full citation. This will become more important if you ever use a source that doesn’t have an author listed.

Works Cited page

At the end of your essay, you should collect all of the information that readers will need if they’d like to find any of the sources that you mentioned or used in your writing. It doesn’t matter whether you quoted, paraphrased, or summarized the source; if you used it, it needs a citation. In MLA style, the place where you put those citations is called the “Works Cited” page.

There are a number of guidelines that govern what your Works Cited page should look like:

• Starts on a new page – This page is separate from the rest of the essay. Even if you end your writing at the top of the last page, you still start the Works Cited page at the top of the next one.
• Title – At the top of the page, centered but without any added style,^[12] put the title “Works Cited.”^[13]
• Alphabetized – All of the citations on the Works Cited page should be alphabetized according to whatever is first in the citation. Normally, that’s the author’s last name, but if something else comes first, use that to put the source in alphabetical order.
• Double spaced – The Works Cited page should be double spaced, just like the rest of your essay. You don’t need to put any extra space in between the different citations.
• Hanging indent – This is perhaps the oddest feature of the Works Cited page. Each citation should be formatted with a hanging indent, which is basically the opposite of how you indent paragraphs. With a hanging indent, the very first line is flush with the left margin.^[14] Every line of the citation after that should be indented half an inch, the same distance you usually indent the first line of a paragraph. When there are a number of citations all together, the hanging indent makes it so that the first line of each citation pops out to the left, making it much, much easier for readers to see the last names of the authors at the beginning of each one. Here’s what a hanging indent looks like on a citation:

As you gather the information for each of the sources you use in your paper, you can’t just write it out however you want, and you certainly can’t just copy and paste a link into your document. The exact type of information, including how you organize and format it, is spelled out in the MLA guidebook. Most online MLA resources will give you different templates to use for each different type of source because of the varying ways that source types are published. So, when you are ready to write a citation for one of your sources, you just need to find the right template and insert the requested information in the right places.

Here’s an example of what an MLA template for a book you quoted from might look like:

When you look at this template, the first thing you see is how to format the author’s name. You can see that you should put their last name first, followed by a comma, then their first name and middle initial. Next, you will see that the title should be italicized and capitalized like a title (see how each of the major words is capitalized?).^[15] Next, there’s a colon and the subtitle, also in title case. After a period, put the city of publication, a comma, the publishing company, a comma, and the date of publication.

Now, templates can’t predict or tell you exactly what your source will look like or what information you will have to include, so you have to make decisions about what you have and what you can do with it. If the author doesn’t have a middle name that they use professionally, then don’t include a middle initial. If the book doesn’t have a subtitle, don’t put the colon or the subtitle. MLA only requires that you include the city of publication if the work was published before 1900 or if the publisher is unknown in North America, so you can skip that if it doesn’t apply. Finally, make sure you format the date according to the MLA date standards discussed in the section on formatting.

Of course, different types of sources require different pieces of information in the citation, so it’s important to make sure you review the template each time you write a citation. You definitely don’t want to leave anything out that would make it harder for your readers to find the sources you used.

Below, I’ll provide a few templates and examples for the more common source types that you might use. Remember that we’re only covering the basics and that you’ll need to confer with more comprehensive resources if you need anything beyond what we cover here.