MLA format

MLA heading

  • heading is always on the left side of paper

  • double spaced

  • include the following in the same format

    • name

    • teacher’s name

    • class

    • date (military style) - 5 June 2024

  • header goes at the top of the paper

  • it consists of your last name and the page number (Rumbo 2)

  • use same font

  • not necessary to include the header on the first page because the heading will suffice

MLA basics

  • double space everything

  • times new roman only

  • 12-point font

  • margins should be set at 1 inch

titles in MLA

  • informative and creative

  • placed one line below the heading and one line above the first paragraph

  • titled should be centered

  • no underlining or italicizing titles

  • only titles of books and plays are italicized; titles of poems and articles are put in quotation marks

citations

  • citations must be within the paper as well apart from a works cited page

  • parenthetical citations, in-text citations

  • if sources are not cited within the paper, it is considered “accidentally” plagiarizing

plagiarism

  • to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own

  • to commit literary theft

  • to use (another’s production) without crediting the source

  • to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

avoiding plagiarism

  • need to include citations to avoid plagiarizing

    • directly quote - use quotations marks around the quoted information

    • paraphrase

    • summarize

  • must cite all information that isn’t your own

parenthetical citations

  • you put the author’s last name and the page number where you found the information in parentheses

    • ex: (Moore 56). - period comes after the parentheses

no author? no page number?

  • put the title of the article or book in parentheses, if no author name is available

    • ex: (“Television Literacy” 6)

  • everything has a page number. (file- print preview: gives accurate page number for the document provided)

  • correct punctuation is required even inside the parenthesis

parenthetical citations cont.

  • whatever is in parenthesis should directly correlate to your Works Cited Page.. it should be the first thing listed in each individual source.

    • ex: Abelman Robert. “Television Literacy for Gifted Children.”

      Roeper Review 9, 1987: 166-169.

      (Abelman 167).

citations should be all over the paper, especially research papers

block quotations

  • if quotation is 4 lines or longer, it needs to be blocked

  • for essays under ten pages, no block quotation is needed. instead smaller portions of the text that capture the meaning of the whole better than you could paraphrase it

  • no quotation marks are needed for longer quotes, but they should be indented on both sides