Skip to Main Content

MLA 9th Edition: Formatted Paper

Overall Format of the Paper

  1. One (1) inch margins
  2. Times New Roman
  3. 12 pt. font
  4. Double spaced
  5. Header - Right Justified - Last Name and Page Number
  6. Name, Teacher Name, Course and Date (written in day-month-year) 
  7. Title of the Paper (written only in Times New Roman 12pt font - no italics, bold or color)
  8. Each new paragraph indented.

Format of Works Cited Page

Your research paper ends with a list of all the sources cited in the text of the paper. This is called a Works Cited list.

Here are eight quick rules for this list:

  1. Start a new page for your Works Cited list (e.g., if your paper is 4 pages long, start your Works Cited list on page 5).
  2. Your last name and page number should remain.
  3. Center the title, Works Cited, at the top of the page and do not bold or underline it.
  4. Double-space the list but do not have extra spaces between each entry.
  5. Start the first line of each citation at the left margin; indent each subsequent line five spaces (also known as a "hanging indent").
  6. Put your list in alphabetical order. Alphabetize the list by the first word in the citation. In most cases, the first word will be the author’s last name. Where the author is unknown, alphabetize by the first word in the title, ignoring the words a, an, the.
  7. For each author, give the last name followed by a comma and the first name followed by a period.
  8. Italicize the titles of full works: books, audiovisual material,websites.
  9. Do not italicize titles of parts of works, such as: articles from newspapers, magazines, or journals / essays, poems, short stories or chapter titles from a book / chapters or sections of an Internet document. Instead, use quotation marks.

Capitalization and Italics

  • Capitalize each word in the titles of articles, books, etc, but do not capitalize articles (the, an), prepositions, or conjunctions unless  it is the first word of the title or subtitle: Gone with the Wind, The Art of War, There Is Nothing Left to Lose.
  • Use italics (instead of underlining) for titles of larger works (books, magazines) and quotation marks for titles of shorter works (poems, articles)

Header and Title

Sample Top of First Page of Paper

 

Smith 1

John Student

Prof. Ellington

Physics I

6 June 2017

Infallible Differences

Common abbreviations

List common MLA abbreviations as they appear below:

  • anon. for anonymous
  • c. or ca. for circa
  • ch. for chapter
  • dept. for department
  • ed. for edition
  • et al. for multiple names (translates to "and others")
  • fwd. for foreword
  • jour. for journal
  • lib. for library
  • no. for number
  • P for Press (used for academic presses)
  • p. for page, pp. for pages
  • par. for paragraph when page numbers are unavailable
  • qtd. in for quoted in
  • rev. for revised
  • sec. or sect. for section
  • ser. for series
  • trans. for translation
  • U for University (for example, Purdue U)
  • UP for University Press (for example, Yale UP or U of California P)
  • var. for variant
  • vol. for volume