Guides: Help Citing Sources: MLA

Resources

MLA Handbook A guide to the principles of MLA writing.
MLA Works Cited: A Quick Guide This site by the Modern Language Association (MLA) explains the structure of MLA 8th Edition citations and provides a practice template for citing your sources.
Purdue OWL Citations From The Writing Lab at Purdue University, this Online Writing Lab (OWL) site helps you cite your sources, format your papers correctly, and even answers common questions about in-text citations. Covers APA, MLA, and Chicago citation styles.
The Writer's Handbook From the Writing Center at the The University of Wisconsin - Madison, this site covers the mechanics of writing academic papers, including how to format your paper and cite your sources in a variety of styles (APA, MLA, etc.).

Quick Start for MLA

List of references begin on a new page and titled Works Cited.

Sources on the Works Cited page should be listed alphabetically by the author's last name.

The entire page should be double spaced. If a citation has more than one line, every line after the first should be indented (also called a hanging indent).

The devil is in the details! Pay special attention to Capitalization, punctuation, and underline and italics formatting.

In addition to providing the full citations for sources, you should include in-text citations in the text of your paper to avoid plagiarism.

Everything listed on the Works Cited page should have a corresponding in-text citation. If there is no in-text citation, that means you didn't use the source and the citation does not need to be included.

Make sure to include the author's last name and page number in your in-text citation, typically as a parenthetical.