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Key takeaways
MLA style comes from the Modern Language Association, and its MLA Handbook is the standard in literature, languages, cultural studies and much of the humanities. The 9th edition, published in 2021, kept the flexible template introduced in the 8th edition and added fuller guidance and many more examples. Instead of memorizing a separate format for every type of source, you assemble each entry from one short list of core elements.
The system has two halves. In your text, a brief parenthetical citation — usually the author's surname and a page number — points to an entry in the Works Cited list at the end of the paper, which gives the full publication details. The author's name is the link between them, so the first word of each Works Cited entry should match the word in your in-text citation. If your course uses author–date citations instead, see the APA citation guide.
Every Works Cited entry follows the same sequence. Include each element that applies, skip any that do not, and punctuate as shown: a period after the author and after the title of the source, commas between the container elements, and a period at the end. Here the elements are filled in for a famous journal article.
Assembled, the entry reads: Watson, J. D., and F. H. C. Crick. “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.” Nature, vol. 171, no. 4356, 25 Apr. 1953, pp. 737–38, https://doi.org/10.1038/171737a0. Only the journal name is italicized. Notice that the page range is shortened: MLA writes the last two digits of the second number when that is unambiguous.
| Order | Element | Example | Followed by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Author | Watson, J. D., and F. H. C. Crick | Period |
| 2 | Title of source | “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” | Period |
| 3 | Title of container | Nature, in italics | Comma |
| 4 | Other contributors | Editors or translators (none here) | Comma |
| 5 | Version | An edition, such as 2nd ed. (none here) | Comma |
| 6 | Number | vol. 171, no. 4356 | Comma |
| 7 | Publisher | Left out for journals, magazines and newspapers | Comma |
| 8 | Publication date | 25 Apr. 1953 | Comma |
| 9 | Location | pp. 737–38, then the DOI | Period |
The basic in-text citation is the author's surname and the page number in parentheses, placed before the sentence's final period: (Morrison 45). If you name the author in your sentence, give only the page: Morrison opens the novel inside the haunted house itself (3). There is no comma between name and page, and no “p.” or “pg.” The common variations:
Prose quotations longer than four lines, and verse quotations longer than three lines, go in a block quotation indented half an inch from the left margin, without quotation marks, with the citation after the final punctuation.
Italics cannot be shown here, so remember the rule: italicize titles of self-contained works (books, journals, websites, films) and put titles of parts (articles, chapters, poems, webpages) in quotation marks. Title the list Works Cited, center it on a new page, double-space it, give each entry a half-inch hanging indent, and alphabetize by the first word of each entry.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. — italicize Beloved. An edition goes after the title (2nd ed.), and so do editors or translators (Translated by …).
Author. “Title of Article.” Journal Name, vol. #, no. #, Year, pp. #–#. Database Name, https://doi.org/xxxx. The database is a second container, with its own title and location.
Author. “Title of Page.” Website Name, Day Month Year, URL. You may drop the http:// or https:// from a URL. If the page shows no date, end with an access date: Accessed 3 Mar. 2025.
Author. “Title of Story or Poem.” Title of Anthology, edited by Editor Name, Publisher, Year, pp. #–#.
Title of Film. Directed by Director Name, Production Company, Year. If your paper focuses on one person's role, you may begin with that person's name instead.
When you meet a source type no example covers — a podcast episode, a museum label, a social media post — walk through the template rather than searching for a matching format:
Literature has its own locators, because page numbers differ from edition to edition. For verse plays, cite act, scene and line with periods between them — (Hamlet 3.1.56–60) — rather than pages. For poems, cite line numbers, writing “line” or “lines” in the first citation and only the numbers after that.
For prose works available in many editions, such as classic novels, give the page in your edition followed by a part that helps readers using a different one: (Austen 89; ch. 12). Name the edition you used in Works Cited, with any editor or translator, since a translation in particular changes the words you are quoting.
The guide to writing a literary analysis shows how to build an argument around these quotations, and the guide to quoting and paraphrasing without plagiarizing covers how to introduce a quotation with a signal phrase and mark any words you change.
Quoting a novel or a play accurately means finding the exact line again, in the edition you used. In Cavua's Work space you can upload your reading — a PDF of the text, lecture handouts, critical articles — and ask questions across all of them, with answers that point to the page. That makes it quicker to check a quotation's wording and page before it goes into a parenthetical citation.
If you are studying literature as a subject, each course in the literature catalogue is built from a book and comes with a 24/7 AI tutor you can chat with, call by voice or video, or ask for an audio summary of a chapter, alongside chapter and lesson tests.
Check your Works Cited list and parenthetical citations against these before you submit:
Chicago citation in the 17th edition: how footnotes and shortened notes work, author-date in-text citations, and bibliography examples for books and articles.
Learn how to paraphrase a source properly: a five-step method, a worked before-and-after example, citation formats, and the mistakes that count as plagiarism.
Learn how to write an abstract step by step: what to include, how long it should be, a move-by-move template, an annotated example and the mistakes to avoid.
Qualitative vs quantitative research explained: what each studies, the data and methods they use, paired examples, and how to choose one for your project.
What an AI research assistant can do for students, what it can't, how to test one before you rely on it, and what to keep out of the files you upload to it.
APA citation in the 7th edition: in-text rules for one, two and three or more authors, plus reference formats for articles, books, chapters and webpages.
The standard form is the author's surname followed by the page number, in parentheses, with no comma and no “p.”: (Morrison 45). If you name the author in your sentence, put only the page number in parentheses. For three or more authors, use the first surname plus et al., and for sources without page numbers, simply leave the number out.
The 9th edition kept the core-elements template of the 8th and mainly expanded around it: many more examples, fuller guidance on formatting, a new chapter on inclusive language, and clarifications to existing rules. A paper correctly formatted in MLA 8 usually needs only small adjustments, so check your instructor's preferences on details such as how DOIs and URLs are written.
Access dates are optional in MLA 9. They are recommended when a source has no publication date, or when it is likely to change or disappear, as many webpages do. Add the date at the end of the entry, after the URL, in the form Accessed 3 Mar. 2025, with the month abbreviated if it is longer than four letters.
Begin the Works Cited entry with the title instead, and alphabetize it by the first significant word, ignoring A, An and The. In the text, use a shortened form of the title in place of the author's name, styled the same way as in Works Cited: italicized for a whole work, or in quotation marks for part of one.
Yes. MLA papers, including the Works Cited list, are double-spaced throughout, with no extra space between entries. The list is titled Works Cited and centered at the top of a new page, entries use a half-inch hanging indent, and they are arranged alphabetically by the first word of each entry, usually the author's surname.
Work the quotation into your sentence and add a parenthetical citation with the author's surname and the page: (Morrison 45). In Works Cited, give the author, the italicized book title, the publisher and the year: Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. If you quote a translated or edited edition, include the translator or editor after the title.
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