How to Write MLA Essay Papers

Video Transcript

"The Modern Language Association actually publishes a whole book about the proper formats for a research paper. So I won't be able to cover all of that in the next couple of minutes. But here are the basics. First of all make sure you have your name and the title of the paper and the page number on the head, for a header on each page; easy enough to setup. Then whenever you refer to a piece of text that isn't your own, in parenthesis, you need the author's name and the page number, last name. If you have a couple of authors with the same last name, then you can use, J. Smith to distinguish from E. Smith and A. Smith and so on. But generally, we just choose in the last name. Then refers us back to the work cited page. On the work cited page, you have everybody listed, last name first, last name first and then first name. If you have two authors, the second author doesn't get reverse like that; first name first. Title, if it's a book, it's underlined or italicized. If it's a journal article, it's in quotation marks. We'll do a book here. The city in which it was published, name of the publisher and the date; just the year is fine, you don't need the exact date it was published. For the city, sometimes you need to add more information. If a book was published in Paris, Tennessee; you've got to specify that it's Paris, Tennessee so people don't think it's Paris, Texas or Paris, France. Just enough so that it isn't confusing. If it's a journal, you don't need to put the city, unless that might be confusing; but you need the issue, the date or the number depending on how the journal does it. And then you also include the page number. And that should keep, that should cover most of your basic references. For the rest, go to your handbook or go to your MLA book."