MLA Formatting: The Basics

I'm going to be honest: I'm not sure what kind of circular reasoning is going on with this meme, but I like memes so I'm keeping it.

Okay, real talk. MLA. What's that about?

MLA is short for Maine Lobster Association; you use it when you're writing about crustaceans and other under-the-sea delicacies, which comes up more often than one would think, especially in Montana.

Not really. Be sure to fact check--you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet. Unless it's a tweet from Anna Kendrick; that's pretty reliable.

MLA is actually short for Modern Language Association, and is one of the two main formats for writing and citing a paper in an academic setting. The other format, APA, is used mostly in the sciences, so we're not going to talk about that one right now (look away, Bill Nye).

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to write an MLA paper that will explode your teachers' brains all over the walls (gross), let's start with the basics: formatting. Formatting a paper correctly makes it look like you know what you're doing, even if the rest of what you write doesn't make much sense. It's like showing up to give a presentation--you don't go in basketball shorts and a Kanye sweater with holes in it.

Writing a paper is the same way. Make it look professional, or else you look like Kanye. Do you want to look like Kanye?

No, don't be Kanye.

A lot of the formatting is pretty straight forward:

12 point font, Times New Roman. Using another font can be distracting and make the paper hard to read, especially if you can't tell when something is in italics.
Double-space. Single-space is only useful when you're trapped alone on Mars and must conserve your supply of paper. If you're reading this, you have WiFi, which means you're not on Mars, which means DOUBLE-SPACE.
One-inch margins for you! One-inch margins for you! One-inch margins for everybody!
Indent each new paragraph half an inch.
Seriously. Do it.
Italicize movies, books, magazines, newspapers (do people still use those?), plays, artwork, TV shows, and albums. Use "quotation marks" for article/chapter titles, songs, and sarcasm (that was sarcasm; don't use them for sarcasm). When in doubt, think of it this way: quotes are for small things (that kitten is "scary"), and italics are for big things (that lion is scary).

I have utter faith in your ability to follow those rules. Now for a little of the more complicated stuff.

Let's start with the header, since that's the first thing you see. Whether or not you have a title page, you will always have a running head in MLA. The running head is easy--just click on your header, align to the right, and put your last name and the page number--JUST THE NUMBER. We don't want any "page number 1" or "p. 1" or "Page | 1" nonsense.

Next comes all the identifying information. Remember to put who you are. Who you are is very important. If you don't put who you are, the teacher doesn't know who you are, and so they assume that you are a friendly parrot with an unusually advanced reading level and amnesia as to its identity because that is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from a nameless paper. Don't let them think you're a parrot; being a parrot is almost as bad as being Kanye.

Here's the proper format to avoid parrot-human species confusion:

Name

Teacher's name

Class

Date

Paper Title

First line of paper. Second line of paper. Third line of paper, etc.

Remember to use double-space and to indent that first paragraph once you get to the body of the paper. Do it right, and it should look something like this:

Obviously this paper is made up, seeing as how in 1987 I was still working a Russian spy and therefore not writing papers.

Notice the running head at the top right. Classy.

That's going to be the normal setup for most of the MLA papers you write. Sometimes a teacher will want something a little different, like a title page. If you need a title page, be sure to listen closely to what the teacher wants on it, because everyone is different. A generic title page will usually look something like this:

Here's a breakdown of what you're seeing:

A third of the way down the page, put the title of your paper. (Pro-tip: people in the real world like two-part titles with a colon in the middle; I don't know why.)
Skip a few lines, then put your name. Saying "by" is optional.
Most of the way to the bottom, put the name of your class, the name of your teacher, and the date.

What goes on this title page will change depending on what your teacher wants, but this gives a ballpark idea of what most people like to see on there. Also notice that there's no running head on this page--that's on purpose. The running head doesn't go on a title page, so just be sure to leave it off. In Word, you can do that by clicking on the header, checking the "Different First Page" box in the Design tab, and deleting the header from the title page. The first page of the actual paper will still have the header and the title (yes, the title ends up going on there twice; that's how special the title is), but the name, teacher, class, and date get left off.

The body of the paper is the easiest, formatting-wise. Just be sure to follow all those rules I laid out earlier, and we're not going to have a problem. Disobey them, and we're going to have a problem, capisce?

After the body, we're down to the home stretch! Keep on trucking a little longer.

Dogs make everything more bearable. Except allergies. But even then....

The last thing you need to know about basic MLA formatting is the reference page. This is probably the most important part of the whole paper because it proves that 1) you're not making stuff up (which is in fact frowned upon in most societies), and 2) you're not stealing other people's smarts without giving them credit (which is in fact frowned upon in a court room). Being lazy is fun, but totally not worth failing a class, getting kicked out of school, or going to jail. I'm trusting you to do the right thing here.

In MLA, the reference page is usually called the Works Cited page. This will be the last page in the paper, and will include a list of all the resources you cited (more on citation in a later post).

Works Cited (no italics, no quotation marks, no indent) should be centered at the top of the page. Your list of sources starts on the next line (since the paper is already double-spaced).

To find out how to set up each citation, I recommend going to Purdue OWL. They'll tell you everything you need to know about what order to put all the information in so people know you mean business. Note: if you use a website and have to put the URL in the citation, your computer might try to turn it blue and make it a hyperlink. To fix this, just right-click on the URL and click "Remove Hyperlink."

After you have your sources formatted correctly, put them on the Works Cited page in alphabetical order by the first word of each source; usually this will be the author's last name, but not always. Each source should have a hanging indent--the first line is not indented, but every line after that is.

The end product should look a little like this: