Why mla style is used

MLA Modern Language Association style is most commonly used to write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities. This resource, updated to reflect the MLA Handbook 8 th ed. All entries in the Works Cited page must correspond to the works cited in your main text.

These entries are called citations. You need to create a citation for every resource you use in your paper or project. Citations can be created for print books, electronic books, magazine articles, newspaper articles, films, online videos, websites, songs, works of art, interviews, and the list goes on. Basically any kind of outside work referenced within your paper or project must have a corresponding MLA citation.

Order the ninth edition. Members may request a complimentary paperback edition of the MLA Handbook. The only official website devoted to MLA style, it provides. Sign up for The Source newsletter. Skip to Main Content. Because the primary advantages of using footnotes are simplicity and concision, this guide describes only one variation of Chicago style: shortened footnotes in a paper that gives a full Bibliography.

What this means is that our examples of Chicago footnotes do not give full bibliographical information at the bottom of the page. Instead, our footnote examples give brief references that would be supplemented, at the end of the paper, with a full Bibliography.

If your teacher tells you to use Chicago style, or footnotes, you should check to see if the shortened format is acceptable. If you need to give the full citation, the format for each note is nearly identical to MLA format, except that a full footnote generally begins with the first name of the author. Note that the footnotes illustrated in this guide focus on publication information, giving only the data necessary for your reader to track down the source.

But footnotes can also be used to comment on a source. Such footnotes are often referred to as discursive footnotes, and they are also used in MLA and APA style to add information about a source.

Historians, especially, sometimes add brief discussions of a source in the footnote that accompanies its first mention. Ask your teachers for examples of writing that use this technique, or browse through the sample papers posted on other parts of the Writing Center website. This guide mentions those variations where relevant. MLA style provides guidelines for referring to information from a note in an in-text citation :.

If you cite multiple Shakespeare plays throughout your MLA paper, the in-text citation begins with an abbreviated version of the title as shown here , e. Each play should have its own Works Cited entry even if they all come from the same collection. Shakespeare 1. No, do not use page numbers in your MLA in-text citations of Shakespeare plays.

Instead, specify the act, scene, and line numbers of the quoted material, separated by periods, e. Shakespeare 3. This makes it easier for the reader to find the relevant passage in any edition of the text. When an article e. In an MLA style Works Cited entry for a newspaper , you can cite a local newspaper in the same way as you would a national one, except that you may have to add the name of the city in square brackets to clarify what newspaper you mean, e.

The Gazette [Montreal]. Dallas Observer. If you focus on a particular contributor e. If your citation of the podcast focuses more on the contribution of someone else e.

MLA recommends citing the original source wherever possible, rather than the source in which it is quoted or reproduced. For example: qtd. If a source is reproduced in full within another source e. For example:. When you want to cite a PowerPoint or lecture notes from a lecture you viewed in person in MLA , check whether they can also be accessed online ; if so, this is the best version to cite, as it allows the reader to access the source.

If the material is not available online, use the details of where and when the presentation took place. In an MLA song citation , you need to give some sort of container to indicate how you accessed the song. If this is a physical or downloaded album, the Works Cited entry should list the album name, distributor, year, and format. However, if you listened to the song on a streaming service, you can just list the site as a container, including a URL.

In this case, including the album details is optional; you may add this information if it is relevant to your discussion or if it will help the reader access the song. When citing a song in MLA style , the author is usually the main artist or group that released the song.

However, if your discussion focuses on the contributions of a specific performer, e. When a source has no title , this part of your MLA reference is replaced with a description of the source, in plain text no italics or quotation marks, sentence-case capitalization. In MLA Style , you should cite a specific chapter or work within a book in two situations:.

If you cite multiple chapters or works from the same book, include a separate Works Cited entry for each chapter. Use a shortened version of the title in your in-text citation. If a source has no page numbers, you can use an alternative locator e. If there are three or more authors, name only the first author, followed by et al. You must include an in-text citation every time you quote or paraphrase from a source e.

If information about your source is not available, you can either leave it out of the MLA citation or replace it with something else, depending on the type of information. MLA style uses title case, which means that all principal words nouns, pronouns , verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and some conjunctions are capitalized.

This applies to titles of sources as well as the title of, and subheadings in, your paper. Use MLA capitalization style even when the original source title uses different capitalization. The title of an article is not italicized in MLA style , but placed in quotation marks. This applies to articles from journals , newspapers , websites , or any other publication. Use italics for the title of the source where the article was published.