how to format an essay in mla

how to format an essay in mla

A Comprehensive Guide to Formatting Essays in MLA Style

1. Introduction to MLA Style

The goal of this tutorial is to guide readers through the effective use of essay formatting. The importance of using this guide should be evident to any reader, as one’s organization and presentation skills have a tendency to dramatically affect one’s overall grade. After reading the tutorial, readers can have confidence in writing a college paper in MLA style. In the first part, we are going to focus on formatting the essay first and then move on to the basics of paper writing.

Students in high school, college, and graduate school are often tasked with writing essays and term papers. As part of their writing initiatives, writing instructors or novice writers at times need to work within the parameters set forth in the Modern Language Association (MLA) style guides. These guides are published by the Modern Language Association of America, which publishes a comprehensive guide to documenting scholarly papers and essays in the field of modern languages in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. Typically, a reader will need to know the rules for organizing an essay or understand how to identify and use different types of documentation. This comprehensive guide provides a step-by-step manual with information on all aspects of essay formatting for a wide range of academic disciplines. Specific instances of how to use the elements are given.

2. Basic Formatting Guidelines

Type the text in a word processing program, remembering basic MLA formatting. When you are happy with the result, paste your text onto the application form on this website. Use 12-point type in a readable font. Please do not use a font that is too small or too elaborate. No cover pages. Double-space your paper. One-inch margins on all sides. Indent the first sentence of each paragraph by 0.5 inches. Header in the upper-right corner of each page and include your last name and page number. Set-off and italicize longer quotations. Keep tabs aligned; preferably use the tab key on your keyboard (rather than the space bar). In-Text Citations Quotation Marks – Even in the case of unusual punctuation and non-English words, always place ‘ and periods inside the final quotation mark. Use double quotation marks for the opening and closing quotation. Use single quotation marks for quotations within quotations. Place period immediately after the parentheses or brackets, within the quotation marks. Place a cite for the source of the quote’s information at the very end of the quote, excluding the final punctuation. Note: Use “qtd. in” for “quoted in” for those, which you found quoted in a source other than itself.

3. In-Text Citations and Works Cited Page

Signal Phrases – The same information about who and where a piece of research comes from is also placed within a signal phrase to help the reader locate it without needing to rely on the in-text citation only, and also to integrate the source’s ideas within the flow of your own sentence. Information from a signal phrase such as this allows the reader to more easily find the source in the works cited page in case they want to read more about the source so they can use it themselves. There are rules associated with signal phrases, which differ significantly depending on how the author is introduced within the sentence.

In-text citations are formatted differently depending on the source and how it is being cited. In general, in-text citations connect a source to its author and indicate that the author’s ideas are being used. MLA formatting creates this connection explicitly for the reader with either the author’s last name or the title of the source. Creating these in-text citations does have a bit of a learning curve since it depends on the reader seeing something in a sentence and understanding its placement. This will be something you will need to get used to doing with practice. It is one of the more difficult parts of learning to use outside sources in writing. Please remember that you only need to have the author’s last name or part of the title (usually the first word or two) in the in-text citation, as well as the appropriate punctuation around it, when the author is identified in the sentence being written about the source.

4. Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Citations should be written in alphabetical order according to the author’s family name. Same as with the format for writing a quotation or in a reference respectively, double spacing separates each citation of sources. When there are two authors, use both names and connect them with ‘and’. At the end of the citation for the two authors, do not use a comma as a connector. Use ‘and’ the same way as with two authors to link the family name of the first one with the name of the second one. Separate the names of different authors with a comma. If there are four or more authors, print the name of the first author and type ‘et al’ after. Use a period to conclude each fact instead of a comma in between them. Inverting the name of the first author is not permitted.

• Do not underline or italicize the title; insert quotation marks around the words. Moreover, the section heading should also not be underlined, nor should there be any period at the end of the title. For the text body, indent every paragraph by 0.5″. The first line of every paragraph should be indented as well, but you have to press the Tab key rather than hitting the space bar five times. Moreover, the text body should be double spaced throughout the quotation, title, and bibliography pages. When it comes to including several sources to support the argument, keep the list as organized as possible.

5. Advanced Tips and Tricks

Centering really long chapter names within MLA style Some chapter names are extremely long. It would probably be somewhat off-putting to see an MLA essay write out such whopping fractions of paragraphs just to keep the chapter names from heading right into them. If that method doesn’t satisfy the readerly itch of unity and regularity, there are other tricks that you can use to make everything seem consistent and proper. Some writers accept the word-spacing effects of using long titles without additional formatting, preferring to minimize such inconvenience by accepting the eyesore. You could take it even further and center the long chapter names, making the text seem more of a piece overall.

Emphasizing titles within your text The standard formatting rule is to italicize book titles. If you’re writing your essay using some other piece of writing as your central text, try italicizing the non-MLA-standard-recommended titles. Many books, even fictional books that are the central topic of your essay, won’t pop up very often and thus might not need italicizing for clarity, though especially long ones tend to lose title status and become sentence-style poems of tempting editorial correctness. However, we italicize the word “italicize”. If you’re writing an essay where you want to remind your readers of the term in the concept and the physical word in the act, consider placing (and italicizing!) the term inside of regular quotation marks for safety and clarity.