Citation Instructions
How to Make a Bibliography
How to Use In-Text Citations
What is MLA Style?
How to Make a Bibliography:
In the MLA writing style, a bibliography is a page of citations that gives credit to sources that are used in an essay, a research paper, or another type or work. The Modern Language Association (MLA) has defined a set of guidelines to follow that has become the standard for creating bibliographies. The bibliography should be a separate page on the last page of the paper and should be titled either Works Cited or Bibliography. Once the citations have been obtained from Weswave.com, they should be put in alphabetical order by the author of the source's last name. If the citation does not have an author, its order will be determined by the first word of the title that is not an article (the, an, a, etc.). If the citation has multiple authors, you should use the author that is listed first, or the author you filled into the field "Author #1" to determine the order. Once your citations are in alphabetical order, make sure that any citations take up more than one line have a hanging indent. A hanging indent is when the first line is not indented, but all of the following lines that the citation takes up are indented. When you have completed all of these steps, your bibliography is finished!
How to Use In-Text Citations:
Although using a bibliography successfully gives credit to the sources that have been used, it is also proper to show where in a paper that the source has been used. To show where, writers use what is called in-text or parenthetical citations. The writer should place an in-text citation directly before the period at the end of a sentence where information from a source has been used (ex: A typical giraffe's tongue is about eighteen inches long (Roberts 22).). Use in-text citations every time that a source is used. When a source is used in consecutive sentences, it is appropriate to save the in-text citation for the last sentence, as long as all are consecutive. In-text citations seem to cause much confusion among writers, and we hope this guide has helped the confusion.
What is MLA Style?
MLA style is the style of writing that the Modern Language Association has created guidelines for. These guidelines were created in order to standardize the format of writing and have been widely adopted. MLA format is especially used in works of literature and language, and is the format used when writing an essay or a research paper for an English class.