Rules for MLA Citing Style

Rules for MLA Citing Style

Every research paper will use other sources within the text. As per copyright infringement rules, every author should quote the name of the source material in his work. In technical terms it is said as in-text citing of others work.

MLA citing style is the preferred style of citing works in research papers. Giving all the details of the source material within the text would be very confusing for the readers.

Hence, while citing source materials within the text, only the author name and the page number are generally used. Entire information about the cited work is given at the end of the research paper under the title Bibliography. In Bibliography, author last name, initials, title of the work, date and year of publication, place of publication, name of the publisher and the medium of publishing are given.

Here are some simple rules of MLA citing style.

• Every in-text citation should include author name and the page number separated by a space. First letter of the author name should be capitalized.

Almonds help to combat diabetes (Herman 28).

• If the author name is not available, the title of the book is given by enclosing the title in quotations. It would be readable if the title is made short.

Almonds play role in controlling diabetes (“The diabetic guide”).

• If you are directly quoting the work from other source, it should be enclosed in quotations. Make sure to present it exactly, without altering any words.
• Another MLA citing style for the author name of the source material is giving the author name as an introductory phrase. In this case, as the author name is given in the text, only the page number will be given in the parenthesis. Never quote just the page number without giving the author name.

Ex: Herman reported that having almonds help to gain control over diabetes (28)

In this example, Herman is the name of the author and 28 is the page number of the book in which the above mentioned details can be found.

As can be seen from the above example, complete details of the reference work are not given in the text. Complete details of the work are given in the works cited list at the end of the paper.

As per MLA citing style, the works cited list should start in a new page. Give the heading “Bibliography” for the page. Now, make a list of all the source materials used in the text. Sort them alphabetically. The general order used for giving the entries in the bibliography is the author, title of the book, city of publication, publisher and the year. In all the entries, title of the book should be underlined. Sometimes, it is possible that you have cited different works of the same author. In such cases, the author name is given only for the first entry. For other entries, three hyphens followed by a period and space should be given. These entries denote the author names given in the preceding entry.

All the above rules of MLA citing should be followed to make the document easy to read and unique from other styles of writing.