When writing an essay, book review, abstract, or academic work with MLA formatting, you will have to deal with third-party citations, abbreviations, footnotes, bibliography. So let’s go over the main sections on formatting MLA style.
General format
It includes guidelines that can be used throughout the document, as well as specific formatting details for the title page of an essay or term paper.
MLA Formatting Guide
In this section, you will learn how to cite sources in accordance with the rules of the 8th edition of the MLA. Note that this system consists of a few general principles, not a large number of specific rules. Thus, this system provides writers with a certain amount of flexibility in citation methods that can be used across the humanities:
- Culturology.
- Art criticism.
- Philosophy.
- Review of fiction.
- Linguistics and language learning.
- Comparative Literature.
- Cultural Studies.
Footnotes and endnotes
Here you will find out:
- How to use both types of annotations, how to use them effectively in documents.
- When can a footnote or endnote be used in conjunction with the body of an article.
- How to number and format notes according to MLA guidelines.
Formatting quotes
This section describes how to properly format citations from third-party literature sources. Here are considered short and long quotes as part of the author’s own proposal, as well as long quotes that are not considered as separate material.
Also in this section you will learn how to add and omit words to convey the meaning of a quote more clearly to the reader.
Abbreviations
Here you will learn how to abbreviate words in historical literature or academic prose according to the MLA style.
All existing abbreviation styles are listed:
- Time.
- Location.
- Academic links.
- Publishers.
It also explains how to format abbreviations within a quote.
Cited page: general requirements
This section explains how to compile a bibliography. You will learn where to indicate the author’s name and surname in the cited page, and where – the publication number and the year of issue of the scientific journal, how to highlight the journal name against the background of the article title from this journal.
Cited page: books
If you used books as a source of information, be sure to indicate the following elements when preparing a list of references:
- The name of the main author.
- Names of co-authors, editors, translators.
- Title of the book.
- Book editions.
- Date of publication.
- The page numbers from which the information was taken.
Here’s how to format a literature source for several types of books:
- Book with one author.
- A book with several authors.
- Two or more books by the same author.
- Book of a corporate publishing house.
- A book without an author.
- Translated book.
- Reprinted book.
- Book editions.
- Anthology or collection.
- Work in a collection or reference book.
- A work from several volumes.
- Reference article.
- Government edition.
- Bible.
- Dissertation.
- Brochure.
- Introduction, preface or afterword.
- Book printed and published before 1900.
It is very important that you design your literature sources according to the MLA style. This way, your readers can quickly read the paragraphs on the cited page, and then find the sources that interest them in the first place. Your readers expect you to provide quotes in a specific style. Any deviation can wreak havoc. Avoid this.