HOW TO FORMAT YOUR ESSAY
Drivers rely on the rules of the road in order to stay safe and to arrive at an intended destination. Readers expect writers to follow certain rules when formatting. The road is not the place for a driver to show off their creativity or to make up their own rules. If a writer ignores the formatting rules, they will confuse the reader.
FORMATTING YOUR PAPER
MARGINS: One-inch on the top, bottom, and sides of each page.
PAGE NUMBERING: Use your word processor to create a header that includes your last name and the page number in the upper right hand corner of the page, one half inch from the top of the page. Every page has this header.
TITLE PAGE: MLA style does not require a title page; instead, the first page of the paper should begin with four lines, double spaced, indicating: your name, name of the course instructor, name of the course, and the date.
SPACING: Double-space every line·
INDENTING: Indent the first line of every paragraph five spaces or one tab. Indent long quotations ten spaces or two tabs.
FONT AND TYPEFACE: Use a 12-point font in Times New Roman
Here is an example of correct formatting for In-text citation.
MLA format follows the AUTHOR-PAGE METHOD of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence.
Rule 1:
In your text, you can mention the source in a phrase that introduces the quotation and place the relevant page number(s) in a parenthetical reference at the end of the paraphrase or quotation, before the end punctuation:
In “Hunger as Ideology,” Susan Bordo claims that women are inundated with advertisements in which “food is constructed as a sexual object of desire and eating is legitimated as much more than a purely nutritive activity” (150).
Rule 2:
Alternatively, you can cite both the information source and the page number(s) in a parenthetical reference at the end of the paraphrase or quotation, before the end punctuation.
We demand images of youth because “sagging flesh is almost the ultimate signifier of decay and disorder” (Bordo 176).
Rule 3:
If the quotation is more than four lines, start a block quotation on a new line and indent it one inch (two tabs) from the left margin. Do not add quotation marks. The end punctuation is placed before the parenthetical reference.
Pratt explains how interactions are viewed through the lens of power:
When linguistic (or literate) interaction is described in terms of orderliness,
games, moves, or scripts, usually only legitimate moves are actually named as part of the system, where legitimacy is defined from the point of view of the party in authority—regardless of what other parties might see themselves as doing. (508)
Rule 4:
If a source has two authors, use both last names in the parenthetical reference
In the end of The Gold Rush, the main character George was able to find his wife even
though she was swept away by the current (Benson and Mumford 26).
Rule 5:
If a source has more than three authors, you may cite all authors or use the last name of the first author followed by “et al.” (Huang et al. 10)
