Formatting a Bibliography: #2 MLA

MLA is the style most of you will follow. If your teacher says to use APA, skip this page and go to the next.

There's an entire book Links to an external site. devoted to MLA rules. This page will cover the essentials.

There's a website called Purdue OWL Links to an external site., or OWL for short, that scholars love. OWL stands for Online Writing Lab. It's the best collection of MLA style rules on the Internet. Go here if you ever need help. Follow the navigation or search for your topic.

Here is a sample works cited page at the end of a research paper. The colorful boxes are not part of the works cited. They are drawing your attention to how to format correctly. 

If you copied your citation from the databases or you used a citation machine [correctly], you will not have to worry about what is italicized, etc. 

Here are the basic rules for MLA formatting from Purdue OWL Links to an external site.:

Basic rules

• Use a new page. 
• Label the page Works Cited (do not italicize or put them in quotation marks) and center it. This is the only line that will be centered on the whole page.
• Make the whole page double-spaced, and do not skip additional lines between entries.
• Indent the second and subsequent lines of citations by 0.5 inches to create a hanging indent. Or use the Google Docs add-on Hanging Indent.
• Arrange the citations in alphabetical order.
• Continue your header or start a new one if the bibliography is a separate document.