Mla Writing Style

Mla Writing Style

All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work.

MLA Writing Style provides standard guidelines for formatting publications and research papers, course works, including: quotations and citing resources. A direct quote is shown in quotation marks and is shown word for word as stated by source.

"The planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but the most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." (Adams 1)

In this example, the direct quote was found in a book, so a parenthetical citation is used, which includes Author and Page Number.

Paraphrasing is a summation without changing the meaning. When paraphrasing, no quotation marks are necessary, as shown in the following example:

People were basically unhappy, most of the time and most of the suggestions for fixing the problem involved moving small pieces of paper. That was odd, because the pieces of paper weren't unhappy. (Adams 1)

MLA style has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century. The association's guidelines are also used by over 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and magazines and by many university and commercial presses. The MLA's guidelines are followed throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries around the world.