MLA Style 

Introduction to MLA Documentation

What you’ll learn to do: examine MLA documentation formatting and practices

If you drive in the U.S., you know green means “go” and red means “stop.” These standardized signals prevent confusion and keep roads safe. Imagine the chaos if a city suddenly changed them!

Academic writing follows a similar system of standardized guidelines to ensure clarity and consistency. Different disciplines use specific formatting styles, such as:

• MLA (Modern Language Association) – Common in language and literature.

• APA (American Psychological Association) – Used in behavioral and social sciences.

Your instructor may require MLA, APA, or both. Following these citation styles allows readers to easily trace your research sources and ensures your work is properly formatted with in-text citations and a References (APA) or Works Cited (MLA) page that appropriately gives credit to the authors who inspired your work.

Editions

MLA periodically updates its style guide. As of 2021, the 9th edition is the latest, but it does not change in-text or Works Cited citations from the 8th edition. You can see a full list of 9th edition changes at the MLA website.

Why Cite?

You will recall from the previous reading that citing is important because:

• citations help others find the information you used in your research paper

• citing your sources accurately helps establish the credibility of your research

• citations connect your work to the work of other scholars

• citations are one way that scholars enter into a dialogue with one another

• citations are a way to honor and acknowledge the work of others who have made your own research possible

MLA Style

MLA style is one of the most common citation and formatting styles you will encounter in your academic career. The MLA, which stands for Modern Language Association, is an organization of language scholars and experts. MLA format is typically used for writing in the humanities and is widely used in many high school and introductory college English classes, as well as scholarly books and professional journals. If you are writing a paper for a literature or media studies class, it is likely your professor will ask you to write in MLA style.

Understanding Citations

Online tools that generate citations for you can be wonderful—they save time and allow you to focus on the knowledge work of writing a paper. No one expects you to memorize exactly how each different type of text is formatted in MLA style. All of us turn to citation generators, the MLA Handbook, or online resources to remind ourselves of the minutiae of citations. But you do need to have some overall familiarity with the format so that you know what information you need to include and so that you can quickly and easily recognize the mistakes that citation generators (computers!) make. Understanding why citations are built the way they are can help you be more critical in your proofreading of generated works cited pages and internal citations.

An incorrect citation is bad form – think about it as the equivalent of being rude to your reader. Good form (good use of MLA format) makes life easier for your reader and makes you look more accomplished, professional, and credible as a writer.

Adapted from "MLA Style" by Lumen Learning, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).