MLA Style
MLA - Modern Language Association of America was founded in 1883. Its general task is to give an opportunity for association members to share their academic works and research results. Now it has more than 30,000 members in more than 100 countries all over the world.
The first rules of MLA style were published in 1985. Now we use the seventh edition of MLA style rules which was published in 2009.
MLA is generally used while humanities researches writing (especially English studies), modern languages and literatures studying, critics of literature, culture research works etc. It is the main style used by the students` majority. This citation style is much easier than other styles.
MLA style has some general requirements to document formatting:
- 1-inch margin on all sides
- Double space
- All pages should contain your last name and page number
- Titles of books, journals, web-sites and magazines should be italicized
- After all punctuation use single space
- Don`t use long publishers` names, e.g. UK: Routledge
- If you don`t have an exact number of pages or they aren`t successive, you can indicate them like 150+
- In case you don`t have some data, you can add n.pag (no pagination), n.p. (no publisher) and n.d. (no date)
- You need to distinguish different kinds of sources, e.g. book, article, web-page etc.
MLA style has two types of citations. The first one is the in-text citation which is used for quotation to the source you currently use. The main rule is that you need to cite the author`s surname and page number from where you took information, e.g. "the development of the Internet over recent years (Krutz, 15)".
In the end of the text you must indicate all used sources in alphabetical order according to authors` last names. If you have some works without author`s information you should cite them according to their title.
The general style of references is: Author (surname, name). "Title of article". Book title (or other source; should be italicized). Editor (if you have him). Edition. Volume. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date. Pages.
