MLA Style Guide

MLA stands for Modern Language Association. It is a style of formatting academic papers that is used mostly in the arts and humanities.


MLA Works Cited

The Modern Language Association requires papers written in MLA Style to include a Works Cited page. This page lists all of the sources cited in a work and ensures that readers can find them if they want to follow up on your research or do their own work on the topic. This also ensures that all of the people and organizations involved in producing the various sources used for a project get credit for their work. Thus, a Works Cited page includes information on authors, publishers, editors, and other groups involved in the research that made your own paper possible.

Here are three guides to formatting and writing Works Cited pages in MLA style:


MLA In-Text Citations

In-text citations help readers find the location of quotes or other specific pieces of information referenced in your paper. MLA Style predominately uses a type of in-text citation called parenthetical citations. This means that the citation information, generally author and page number, appears after quotes and paraphrases in parentheses. There are, however, some exceptions.

Here are links to three different websites that compile all the different rules for MLA in-text citations:


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“MLA Style Guides” by Andrew Fields is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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UNM Core Writing OER Collection Copyright © 2023 by University of New Mexico is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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