MLA-d Formatting a Research Paper

Name, course, title. MLA does not require a separate title page, unless your paper is a group project. In the upper left-hand corner of your first page, include your name, your instructor’s name, the course name and number, and the date. Center the title of your paper on the line after the date; capitalize it as you would a book title. If your paper is a group project, include all of that information on a title page instead, listing all the authors.

Page numbers. In the upper right-hand corner of each page, one-half inch below the top of the page, include your last name and the page number. If it’s a group project and all the names don’t fit, include only the page number. Number pages consecutively throughout your paper.

Font, spacing, margins, and indents. Choose a font that is easy to read (such as ) and that provides a clear contrast between regular text and italic text. Set the font size between 11 and 13 points. Double-space the entire paper, including your works-cited list and any notes. Set one-inch margins at the top, bottom, and sides of your text; do not justify your text. The first line of each paragraph should be indented one-half inch from the left margin. End punctuation should be followed by one space.

Headings. Short essays do not generally need headings, but they can be useful in longer works. Use a large, bold font for the first level of heading, and smaller fonts and italics to signal lower-level headings. MLA requires that headings all be flush with the left margin.

• First-Level Heading
• Second-Level Heading
• Third-Level Heading

Long quotations. When quoting more than three lines of poetry, more than four lines of prose, or dialogue between characters in a drama, set off the quotation from the rest of your text, indenting it one-half inch (or five spaces) from the left margin. Do not use quotation marks, and put any parenthetical documentation after the final punctuation.

In Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan captures ancient and contemporary Antioch for us:

At the height of its glory in the Roman-Byzantine age, when it had an amphitheater, public baths, aqueducts, and sewage pipes, half a million people lived in Antioch. Today the population is only 125,000. With sour relations between Turkey and Syria, and unstable politics throughout the Middle East, Antioch is now a backwater—seedy and tumbledown, with relatively few tourists. I found it altogether charming. (123)

In the first stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” the exclamations make clear that the speaker is addressing someone who is also present in the scene:

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling. (lines 6-10)

Be careful to maintain the poet’s line breaks. If a line does not fit on one line of your paper, put the extra words on the next line. Indent that line an additional quarter inch (or two spaces). If a citation doesn’t fit, put it on the next line, flush with the right margin.

Tables and illustrations. Insert illustrations and tables close to the text that discusses them, and be sure to make clear how they relate to your point. For tables, provide a number (Table 1) and a title on separate lines above the table. Below the table, provide a caption with source information and any notes. Notes should be indicated with lowercase letters. For graphs, photos, and other figures, provide a figure number (Fig. 1) and caption with source information below the figure. Use a lowercase “f” when referring to a figure in your text: (fig. 1). If you give only brief source information, use commas between elements—Zhu Wei, New Pictures of the Strikingly Bizarre #9, print, 2004—and include full source information in your list of works cited. If you give full source information in the caption, don’t include the source in your list of works cited. Punctuate as you would in the works-cited list, but don’t invert the author’s name: Berenice Sydney. Fast Rhythm. 1972, Tate Britain, London.

List of works cited. Start your list on a new page, following any notes. Center the title, Works Cited, and double-space the entire list. Begin each entry at the left margin, and indent subsequent lines one-half inch (or five spaces). Alphabetize the list by authors’ last names (or by editors’ or translators’ names, if appropriate). Alphabetize works with no author or editor by title, disregarding “A,” “An,” and “The.” To cite more than one work by a single author, list them as in no. 4 on page 17.