Introduction to MLA Documentation

MLA style is one of the most common citation and formatting styles you will encounter in your academic career. Any piece of academic writing can use MLA style, from a one-page paper to a full-length scholarly book. It is the most common documentation style for humanities subjects.

The importance of using citations is explained in the following video. Note that this video is not focused on MLA, and that the in-text citations and Works Cited pages it displays are not in MLA style. The point is to reinforce the concept of citation as vital to academic conversation (and it’s plagiarism, by the way, not plagarism!):

The Purpose of MLA Style

The MLA style guide aims to accomplish several goals:

  1. to assist with the consistent use of edited standardized English in academic writing
  2. to ensure consistent formatting and presentation of information, for the sake of clarity and ease of navigation
  3. to ensure proper attribution of ideas to their original sources, for the sake of intellectual integrity

Citation Resources

There are many fantastic resources out there that can make the formatting and citation process easier. Some common style guides are found at:

  • The Purdue Online Writing Lab: this is a popular resource that concisely explains how to properly format and cite in various academic styles.
  • EasyBib: in addition to having a style guide, this website allows you to paste in information from your research and will create and save citations for you.

Reference management websites and applications can also assist you in tracking and recording your research. Most of these websites will even create the works cited page for you! Some of the most popular citation tools are:

The New Edition

The newest edition of the MLA Handbook, the ninth edition, was released in 2021, and it’s a chunky 459 pages long in the printed version. It does follow fairly closely from the eighth edition, published in 2016, which is the text we are basing this module on because we’re only addressing the documentation you’re most likely to need for college written assignments. You should be aware, however, that some instructors may still use the seventh edition of the handbook—not even professors keep up with every development in documentation style. It is valid to ask your instructors what their personal preference is, and of course you should use whichever version they ask you to: regardless of the exact conventions, following any documentation style is an exercise in attention to detail and respect for your discipline.

While the overall principles of creating a works cited page and using in-text citations have remained the same for years, there were a few key changes and updates in the eighth edition that make the citation process easier for our modern uses. For example, the guidelines now state that you should always include a URL of an internet source; you can use alternative author names, such as Twitter handles (or X handles, if that rebranding endures); you no longer need to include the publisher in some instances; and you don’t need to include the city where a source was published. These new changes allow for a more streamlined citation process that will work with a wide variety of source locations such as YouTube videos, songs, clips from TV episodes, websites, periodicals, books, academic journals, poems, or interviews.