MLA Style Sheet

General Guidelines

Please also visit the Academic Integrity LibGuide, which provides a Citation guide for your information.

• Everything in the paper is double-spaced: works cited, indented quotes, etc.
• Pagination: student's last name and the page number are placed on each page's upper right-hand corner.
• Quotes that are more than four lines long are indented one inch from the left margin only.
• Title Page: ask the professor for his or her preference.
• Punctuation: the period always goes after the documentation parentheses except in an indented quote, where it goes before.

MLA Works Cited

BOOKS

A BOOK BY A SINGLE AUTHOR
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Nine Tailors. San Diego: Harcourt, 1962. Print.

A BOOK BY MORE THAN ONE AUTHOR (OR EDITOR)
Kerrigan, William, and Gordon Braden. The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.Print. 

Dyal, James A.,William C. Corning, and Dale M. Willows. Readings in Psychology: The Search for Alternatives. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw, 1975. Print.

WORKS BY MORE THAN THREE AUTHORS (OR EDITORS)
Nielsen, Niels C., Jr., et al. Religions of the World. 3rd ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. Print.

A BOOK COMPILED BY AN EDITOR(S)
Arp, Thomas R. and Greg Johnson, eds. Perrine's Story and Structure. 12th ed. Boston: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.

A WORK IN AN ANTHOLOGY OR A COLLECTION
Fairbairn-Dunlop, Peggy. "Women and Agriculture in Western Samoa." Different Places, Different Voices. Ed.

Janet H. Momsen and Vivian Kinnaird. London: Routledge, 211-26. Print.

AN ARTICLE WITHOUT AN AUTHOR IN A REFERENCE BOOK
"Hadadrimmon." Davis Dictionary of the Bible. John D. Davis, ed. 4th ed. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1972. Print.

ARTICLES

AN ARTICLE FROM A WEEKLY OR BIWEEKLY MAGAZINE
Glastris, Paul. "The New Way to Get Rich." U.S. News & World Report 7 May 1990: 26-36. Print.

AN ARTICLE FROM A DAILY NEWSPAPER
Wilford, John N. "Corn in the New World: A Relative Latecomer." New York Times 7 Mar. 1995, late ed.: C1+. Print.

AN ARTICLE IN A SCHOLARLY JOURNAL
Rosen, Jonathan. "The Celestial Rolodex." The American Scholar 73 (Autumn 2004): 115-118. Print.

AN ANONYMOUS ARTICLE
"Awash in Garbage." New York Times 15 Aug. 1987, sec. 1: 26. Print.

INTERNET AND OTHER SOURCES

INTERNET SOURCE (without author)
"Bertha Advances toward Bahamas." CNN WORLD News. 9 July 1996. Web. 21 March 2011.

ARTICLE FROM A SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ONLINE
Brittain, Clark M. "The Architecture of Redemption: Spatiality in the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor." The Journal of Southern Religion 4 (2001). 25 July 2005. Web. 25 March 2011.

MATERIAL FROM A DATABASE ON CD-ROM
Grych, John H. "Patterns of Adjustment among Children of Battered Women." Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 68 (2000): 84-94. Abstract. PsycLIT. CD-ROM. Silverplatter. 23 July 2003.

FILM, VIDEO, OR FILM CLIP ONLINE
"The Glory Suffered: The Transfiguration of the Cross." The History of the Orthodox Christian Church. 2003. GoTelecom Online. 24 Oct. 2003. Web. 5 April 2011.

BIBLE
Bible. Revised Standard Version. Cleveland: Word Publishing Company, 1962. Print.

LECTURE
Mitten, David M. "Greek Art and Architecture in the West: Southern Italy, Sicily, and Campania." Class lecture. Harvard University. Cambridge, 15 May 1989.

MUSIC
Sting, narr. Peter and the Wolf, op. 67. By Sergei Prokofiev. Chamber Orch. of Europe. Cond. Claudio Abbado. Deutsche Grammophon, 1990.

Parenthetical Documentation

BASIC FORM (last name and page number)
Dr. James is described as a "not-too-skeletal Ichabod Crane" (Johnson 68).

AUTHOR'S NAME IN TEXT
Johnson describes Dr. James as a "not-too-skeletal Ichabod Crane" (68).

SOURCE BY TWO OR THREE AUTHORS
The Authority-Rebel "tends to see himself as superior to other students in the class" (Dyal, Corning, and Willows 4).

A MULTIVOLUME WORK
In the middle of several volumes of modern literary criticism, Rene Wellek admits, "An evolutionary history of criticism must fail. I have come to this resigned conclusion" (5: xxii).

ONE OF TWO (or more) WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
A friend of C. S. Lewis once said that Lewis "gave me not only love, but wisdom and understanding and, when necessary, severity" (Vanauken, Severe 21).

WORK LISTED ONLY BY THE TITLE (magazine article)
An international pollution treaty would prohibit plastic garbage from being dumped at sea ("Awash" 26).

SECONDARY SOURCE THAT QUOTES THE ORIGINAL
E. M. Forster says, "The collapse of all civilization, so realistic for us, sounded in Matthew Arnold's ears like a distant and harmonious cataract" (qtd. in Trilling 11).

INTERNET SOURCE
Often there are no page numbers for the source, so indicate in the text who the author is. For example, Hershel Winthrop interprets Hawthorne's stories as the search for holiness in a corrupt Puritan society.

May 2012, compiled and updated by Karyn Hecht at Moody Bible Institute, Chicago