The College Student's Guide to Writing A Great Research Paper by Eby Erika;Eby Erika;

Author:Eby, Erika;Eby, Erika;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: college, students, research papers, assignment, hints, tricks, stand out, perfect score, grammar, style, editors, grading, criteria successful
Publisher: Atlantic Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

MLA Format

Modern Language Association (MLA) format might already be familiar to some students entering college. Some high schools use it as their default paper-writing format, and you might have had to use it in an English or composition course. MLA is most commonly used in English classes but is often the default style for all humanities and modern language classes. Because MLA is associated with the humanities, and humanities classes tend to assign more papers than others, it is worth taking time to familiarize yourself with the format regardless of your field of study.

A Note to Non-English Majors

Doing projects for classes outside your chosen major can be frustrating, and some students dread it. Many scientifically minded individuals have difficulty with English classes and paper-writing in general though lab reports might bother them less. But as a college student, you will be required to fill out your transcript with general education classes to meet graduation requirements. This will include English, history, and other humanities courses. You will be hard-pressed to get out of college without having to write an English paper at some point. For this reason, it might behoove you to at least briefly familiarize yourself with MLA format on top of whichever format your chosen major predominantly uses. It will give you one fewer worry when you write that dreaded English paper.

The MLA in-text citation

MLA format uses parenthetical in-text citations. Parenthetical means your citation will be enclosed with parentheses. Inside the parentheses, include the last name of the author and the page number, or numbers, the information being cited was taken from. The author’s last name will come first followed by the page number. When citing poetry, use the line number rather than a page number. Do not place a comma between the author’s last name and the page number. The citation should also go at the end of the information cited but before the terminal punctuation, a period in most cases. In the cases of particularly short papers or literary analysis not involving any secondary sources, you might only have one location you are drawing information from. In this case, you might use just a page number within the parentheses.

Sample MLA citations

Here are three sample citations from three different sources. A quote taken from page 15 of John Doe’s book Why Getting Citations Right is Really Important would be presented as follows:

“There is no excuse for getting a citation wrong,” (Doe 15).

If this quote came from a scholarly journal rather than a book, the in-text citation would look exactly the same:

“There is no excuse for getting a citation wrong,” (Doe 15).

The only difference if the quote came from a website is the website has no pagination, so there is no page number to reference:

“There is no excuse for getting a citation wrong,” (Doe).

As with the website, you will occasionally run into sources that do not have all of the information you would generally use for a citation. It would be impossible to cover every single exception in this book, so when you run into trouble, check an MLA style guide.

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