Mason Boyer
English 100, 101
MLA Documentation– the Essentials
This is a very brief guide to the essentials (what everyone should know, what every teacher
expects) of MLA documentation. Documentation is endlessly detailed and complicated– the
official MLA guide is over 300 hundred pages long! It is impossible and unimportant to
memorize every single detail; I don’t have it all memorized, neither do your other teachers, nor
should you. Rather, it is useful to be familiar with the basic principles, the names of the
different parts, and what most instructors will expect of you, which is the purpose of this guide.
For the more detailed information, do what all professionals do: have a resource handy that you
can quickly and easily consult when necessary. For example, I have the OWL’s MLA format
guide bookmarked on my browser, so any time I need to know how to do something that I do not
have memorized, I look it up!
MLA format can be broken down into three main parts: page layout, in-text citation, and the
Works Cited page. Since we have discussed page layout elsewhere, this guide focuses on
in-text citation and the Works Cited page.
In-text citations and the Works Cited page are designed to work together to effectively achieve
two important obligations without interfering with the readability of your writing: 1) you must
tell your reader where you are getting your information from, and 2) you must give credit to the
intellectual property of others.
1) where is your information coming from? Remember, research is for the writer, but sources
are for the reader. The primary purpose of sources is to enhance the ethos (ethical appeal) of
your writing. You want the reader to trust your information, to get the impression that your
thoughts and opinions are derived from credible facts and examples, to see that what you are
trying to say is the result of thorough consideration of multiple viewpoints. We borrow the
credibility and authority of our sources in order to enhance our own credibility and authority as
writers.
2) give credit where credit is due: Common knowledge does not need to be documented, but
anything that you did not already know, that you would not have known without consulting the
source, is someone else’s intellectual property and must be documented. Failure to do so is
plagiarism. Such intellectual property even extends to word choice.
In-Text Citations
Simply, this refers to the parenthesis that need to be placed after every direct quote or at the end
of any sentence that contains paraphrased source information. The basic in-text citation looks
like this (Boyer 25). Its primary purpose is to tell the reader where to look on the Works Cited
page in order to find the entire bibliographical entry. The only other thing that should ever
appear in an MLA in-text citation is the page number that the quote or paraphrase appears on in
the original source. Obviously, this can not be done for most online and other electronic
sources, in which case the in-text citation will look more like this (Boyer).
*The reason it is done this way is to avoid cluttering up the writing itself with long, messy, ugly,
and distracting bibliographical references. Therefore, as a general principle, in-text citations
should be as clean, short, simple, and clutter-free as possible.
*In-text citations are considered a part of the sentence in which they appear; therefore, the period
always, without exception, belongs after the citation, as you see in both examples above. Never
place a period before an in-text citation. If a direct quote you use ends with a period, do not
include the period in the quote; rather, end the quote, close quotation mark, then the citation, and
then the period, like this: “blah blah blah” (Boyer 57). However, if a quote ends with a question
or exclamation mark, then you must include it in the quote as it affects the meaning of the quote,
and you still place a period after the citation, like this: “blah blah?” (Boyer 674).
*If you are not sure what to put in an in-text citation, keep in mind that its primary objective is to
tell the reader where to find the full entry on the Works Cited page; therefore, when in doubt, the
first word of the full Works Cited entry should appear inside the in-text citation. Most Works
Cited entries begin with the author’s last name, which is why the standard in-text citation looks
like this (Boyer 31). In short: whatever a reader sees in an in-text citation, the reader expects to
see a full bibliographical entry on the Works Cited page that begins with that word/words. For
example, some sources do not have identified authors, and in many cases the bibliographical
entries for such sources begin instead with the title, in which case the citation would look
something like this (“Title” 54) or (“Title”). In the case of long titles, you may shorten the title
in the in-text citation so long as it is easy to identify the source on the Works Cited page.
The Works Cited Page
The Works Cited page is where readers can find the complete bibliographical information for
every source referenced in your essay. If there is no citation for a source in the actual essay,
then it should not be listed on the Works Cited page. There are literally hundreds of types of
sources, and variations of those types of sources, so it is impossible to memorize the rules for
every entry. Sure, you may memorize several of the more common entries over time, but for the
most part, you should keep a reference handy (I have the OWL bookmarked on my browser, for
example) so you can look up the correct entry format on a case-by-case basis. Following are a
few basic rules for the Works Cited page that are easy to memorize, that every teacher knows
and expects to see:
–The Works Cited page should begin on a separate page at the end of your essay, but it should
have the same one-inch margins and header as the rest of your paper. Although the Works
Cited page will have a header and page number, it does not count towards page length
requirements.
–center the title, Works Cited, on the first line of the first page (only the first page, if your Works
Cited is longer than one page). Do not use quotation marks or underline the title.
–the Works Cited page, like every other page in MLA format, should be evenly double-spaced.
Do not skip extra lines or single space anywhere on the Works Cited page.
–arrange entries alphabetically. Do not use numbers, bullets, dashes, etc.
–the first line of each entry should be against the left 1" margin. If an entry is more than one
line long, all subsequent lines should be indented ½" (one tab space, or five space bar spaces),
sort of the opposite of a paragraph. For example:
Thompson, Sarah and Peter Tournikov. “Mason Boyer: Bestest Teacher in the History of the
Universe.” Wall Street Journal 15 December 2008: B2.