How to Write in MLA Style

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk to you about what is MLA report style. MLA, or the Modern Language Association report style is the style for formatting research papers and reports that is widely accepted by many colleges. So, what you can do is get the MLA handbook, which is going to help you a lot in figuring out exactly how to use MLA. But today I'm just going to give you a couple of things to think about when writing in MLA. When you format the first page of your MLA paper you're going to of course want to put your name, the professor's name, the course, and the date in the upper left hand corner, double spaced. And then to the right you're going to have your name or your last name followed by the page number. And then after that you're going to have the title of your paper as you see in my example here, and then you're going to from there on have your paper double spaced. This is standard format. Whenever you set the margins to MLA style, make sure that you are doing it according to the exact stipulations in this handbook. I'm also going to give you an example of two different ways to cite in MLA format. The first, is with only one author. The name of the author goes last name first and then the last... the name of the book, and the publishing house and the date of publication. And then we have more than two authors, which is an interesting one, here we have one author and then et al, which means all the others, so you don't have to list if a book has twenty different authors, you don't have to list them all in MLA format. These are just two examples of the many different ways to cite things in MLA. And you have to be very specific about how you go about citing certain books. And the best way to do that is to refer to the handbook because try as I might I would never be able to tell you all the different ways to format an MLA citations page or paper in just a couple of minutes. So good luck."