MLA Overview
This guide focuses on MLA style, which was developed by the Modern Language Association. Most high school English classes use it, so it might be the one you are most familiar with. In college, English courses as well as other humanities disciplines tend to use this style format. The style is designed to provide guidelines for preparing and organizing writing, as well as providing enough detail about a source to allow others to locate it. The various text format changes and what content is provided in a citation also help provide clues to the reader about what type of source it is. As with any citation style, make sure that your discipline (or instructor) requires MLA style for writing and research before you use it.
There are multiple ways to cite the same source depending on where, when, and how you accessed it. For example, the same article can be published online in HTML or in PDF, but also on paper in a print issue. Despite these differences, MLA follows a uniform structure for citing all works based on certain core elements, such as the author, title, and publication date. To help you follow this uniform structure, MLA offers a template with such core elements (established in the 2016 eighth edition), rather than providing individual rules for each type of work. The purpose of the template is to help you provide whatever information you have available to help your readers retrace your steps and find the same source. At the undergraduate level, it is best to keep your citations as simple as possible. In more advanced research, you will want to dig deeper into the possibilities and details of citations.
The “MLA Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing” button above will take you to information on the various ways to format direct quotations and paraphrases according to MLA guidelines. Use the “MLA Parenthetical Citations” button to find more information on proper in-text citations, and use the “MLA End Citation Models” button for instructions/examples on full citations for your Works Cited section.
Note: All material provided in this guide reflects the 9th ed. of the MLA Handbook, published in April 2021.
If you need additional help with writing or document formatting, consider visiting the Writing Center at VCU. For help finding or assessing the quality of a resource, talk with a research librarian at one of the VCU Libraries. And of course, it’s always a good idea to speak with your professor for these and any other assignment-related questions you might have.