Malibu High School English Department
Guidelines for the Format of Essays
When turning in essays for your English class, you need to follow these guidelines. All
English teachers in the department will expect essays to be formatted in this manner.
1. Double space throughout the essay. No triple spacing and no single spacing.
2. One-inch margins on all four sides (left, right, top and bottom).
3. Times New Roman 12 point font throughout essay, including title (center, but do
not underline).
4. Name, class, teacher’s name, assignment title and date are justified on the left
side.
5. Student’s last name and number indicating page justified on the upper right hand
corner - Smith 2 - of each page.
6. The title of your essay follows the rules for capitalizing titles (do not put your title
in all caps, italics, bold, quotes or underline).
7. Indent five spaces for a new paragraph.
8. When using only one text, use the following format to cite pages: “There was
only one catch – and that was Catch 22” (29). This citation includes the page
number of the book on which the quote is located.
9. When using several texts in an essay, you must identify author and page number
parenthetically at the end of the sentence in which the citation occurs – (Heller
29). (Note that the final punctuation for the sentence is placed after the
parenthesis.) At the end of the essay, a work cited page should list,
alphabetically, all works used in the paper.
10. No title page is necessary. The title of the paper is centered and appears below
the name, class, teacher, assignment title and date heading.
11. For quotations longer than 50 words, or 4 lines long, indent 10 spaces from left
margin, and typing it double-spaced without adding quotation marks. A colon
generally introduces a quotation displayed in this way.
12. You should always introduce and integrate quotes into the text of your essay. Do
this by introducing the quote by stating the character or idea it refers to, or the
authorship.
13. When you mention an author’s name you should first say his or her full name, but
then after that you may refer to them by his or her last name.
14. Titles of all works of literature should be italicized in a typed essay – The Old
Man and the Sea.
*All information obtained from:
Modern Language Association of America. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research
Papers. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Print.