MLA rules:

You have the formatting page on the Home Page of the website that shows you basics about formatting your paper. Five line header; page numbers with last name on all pages (except the first page) at the top right hand of the page, no page number on Works Cited page (it’s recommended that you create a new document for a Works Cited); one inch margins; double-space the entire paper; title centered (and your title does not require quotation marks or italics unless you incorporate the title of the piece you’re analyzing, and then only the title of that piece will be designated).

Italics are used to denote: magazines, journals, novels, movies, plays, newspapers, database titles, websites

Quotation marks should go around these titles: short stories, poems, songs, essay and articles

You have a link to the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) on the Home page of our syllabus website. I will use this and the textbook to demonstrate standard entries that students use.

In-text citations: whatever you place in the parentheses ( ) should match the entry on your works cited page. If you have not named the author of the piece in the set-up of the quotation you’re using, then you include the author and the page number in the parenthetical citation (Smith 20). Any punctuation other than a question mark or an exclamation point will not be included in your quotation. The period (or comma if you’re continuing the sentence) will be placed outside of the closed parentheses.

Your textbook and OWL both give you excellent examples of how to structure an in-text citation if there is not author – title – etc.

EVERY quotation should be cited – and EVERY paraphrase (where all you have done is change the wording of someone’s work) should be followed by parenthetical (in-text) documentation.

MLA – MODERN LANGUAGES ASSOCIATION functions as a cross-reference for your reader. They should be able to turn to your Works Cited page with every quotation in your paper and locate the entry – and then, be able to locate where you got your information.

Standard format you will follow (adding or taking away information that is or is not available to you):

Author (last name, first name). The title of the piece. Where you found the piece. Place it was

Published: Company that published it, year it was published. Page numbers. Print or Web.

Works cited entries are double spaced – and second lines are indented.

Practice examples (we are going to dissect each one of these entries to determine where they came from)

Cooke, James E. “Alexander Hamilton.” World Book Encyclopedia. 1996 ed. Print.

Wilk, Max. Every Day’s a Matinee. New York: Norton, 1975. Print.

Melvin, Herman. The Confidence Man. Ed. Hersel Parker. New York: Norton, 1971. Print.

Pfennig, David. “Kinship and Cannibalism.” Bioscience 47 (1997): 667-75. Print.

Navarro, Mireya. “Women in Sports Cultivating New Playing Fields.” New York Times on the Web

13 Feb. 2001. Web. 22 Feb. 2001.

Clemetson, Lynette. “A Ticket to Private School.” Newsweek 27 Mar. 200: n. pag. LexisNexis.

Web. 5 May 2000.

Try it yourself:

1. An online article with no author titled Robert Frost: A Reader Response Perspective. The article appears on the online journal Off the Wall and had a location of http://www.offthewall.com/articles/backdated_bin_RobertFrost_archive.html. The article is listed with the date May 8, 2003, but you found it on January 4, 2004.

An interview of playwright Neil Simon. The interview was titled Neil Simon on the new York Theater and appeared in the September 3, 1997, issue of the Long Island News, on pages C4 and C5. The interviewer was Pearl Barnes.

A book written by Jean Descola and titled A History of Spain. The book, translated by Elaine Pl Halperin, was published in 1962 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York.

A Doll’s House from our textbook. (see page 27 for an example).

If you used a definition of “structure” from our textbook, this would have been written by the editors. How would you cite this in a Works Cited and in an in-text documentation. The definition is on page 115.