Web Links for MLA Style:

Citing Books:

Book with  one author  

Book with two authors

Faber, Doris, and Harold Faber. The Assassination of Martin Luther
        King, Jr. New York: Watts,1978.

Books with three authors

Last Name, First name, First name Last name, and First name Last name.Title. Place of publication: Publisher, copyright date.

For example:

Marquart, James W., Sheldon Olson, and Jonathan R. Sorensen. The
        Rope, the Chair, and the Needle. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994.

Books with more than three authors

Name only the first author and add et al. (and others) OR list all authors in the order they appear on the title page:

For Example:

Gilman, Sander, et al. Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: U of California P,
       1993.

OR

Gilman, Sander, Helen King, Roy Porter, George Rousseau and Elaine
       Showalter. Hysteria beyond Freud. Berkeley: U of California P,
       1993.

Edited book  

Article or essay in an edited book

Electronic Book:

One volume reference work  

Multi-volume reference work 

Citing an Article in an Online Reference Database

EBSCO  

Student Resource Center

ELibrary

Facts.com

"Safe Drinking Water Act Signed." Facts On File World News Digest, 22
       August 1996. FACTS.com. CNN Library, Atlanta, GA. January 15,
       2000 <http://www.2facts.com/>.  

"Issues and Controversies: Racial Disparities." Issues and Controversies
       On File, 13 January 1996. FACTS.com. Uris Library, Ithaca, NY.
       January 11, 2000 <http://www.2facts.com/>.  

"Asteroid's Path Explains Extinction Mysteries." Today's Science On File,
       January, 1997. FACTS.com. Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham,
       AL. January 10, 2000 <http://www.2facts.com/>.

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Magazine article with author (actual print magazine; not from online source)  

Magazine article without author (actual print magazine; not from online source)  

Magazine article with author from an online source  

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Newspaper article with author from an online source

Newspaper article without author (from print newspaper)

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Truman. HBO. HBO, Chicago. 9 Sept. 1995.  

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Electronic Book:

Author. Title.  Place and year of publication.  

        Electronic publisher. Access date URL

For Example

Nesbit, Edith. Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism.  London, 1986. Net
       Library.  26 June 2005
       <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/nesbit.html>.

Information Database:

Title of database. Original date of information. Host (if available).
       Access date. URL

For Example

Thomas: Legislative Information on the Internet. 19 May 2002.
       Lib. of Congress, Washington. 24 Dec. 2004 
      <http://thomas.loc.gov/>.

Personal Site:

Name. Homepage. Date last updated. Access date. URL

For Example

Lancashire, Ian. Home page. 28 Mar. 2003. 15 May 2005

            <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~ian/>.

Article in an Online Magazine:

Author. Title. Publication. Date. Access date URL

For Example

Levy, Steven. "Great Minds, Great Ideas." Newsweek
           27 May 2004. 3 June 2005 <http://msnbc.com>.

Work from a Personal Subscription Service:

Title of entry. Title of database. Version. Date published.

           Subscription name. Access date. URL

For Example

 "Table Tennis." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Vers.2.0. 1997.
        America Online. 4 July 1998 <http://comptons.com>.

Posting on a Discussion List

Author. Title. Online posting. Original date. List name. Access
        date. URL

For Example

Merrian, Joanne. "Spinoff: Monsterpiece Theatre." Online posting.
       30 Apr. 2001. The Global Electronic Shakespeare Conf. 23
       Sept. 2002
       <http://www.shaksper.net/archives/1994/0380.html>.

Citing Government Documents

See:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/usgd/citation.html

Parenthetical Citations

If you use the author to introduce the quotation, only the page number appears in the parenthesis:

For Example

According to R. Lewis, "When Thoreau would sit outside his house..." (93).

If you don't use the author to introduce the quotation, state the author's last name and the page number within parenthesis:

For Example

Thoreau believed that, since America was a new nation, it had abundance of natural resources (Fussell 152).

Note: no comma within the parenthesis and the period follow the citation.

Long Quotations

Do not use quotation marks; quote should be at least 4 lines long; indented an inch or at least 10 spaces, and double-spaced.

For Example

In "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman lavishes praise on the earth:

          Smile, o voluptuous, cool-breathed earth

          Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees

          Earth of departed sunset, earth of mountains misty-topped

          Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with

          blue...

          Smile, for your lover comes. (87)

Books with Multiple Authors

Use the authors' last names as they appear on the title page. Include up to three authors:

For Example

In the 1970s the Great Pyramid inspired a fad of pyramid enthusiasts, who...(Schul and Pettit 159).

If there are more than three authors use "et al." showing there are others.

For Example

The editors of Writing About the World  set an agenda for their text book. (McLeod et al.).

Music and Film

Titles of films and recordings should be underlined or put in italics. A song's title is placed in double quotation marks.

For Example

In "Vague Directions," a song from McMurtry's Candland, an old man asks the main character about his mother who moved away. The old man sounds a bit like the intolerant men in Easy Rider when he asks, "Did she show you how to curl that hair?/ A grown man would have never dared/ When I was just a boy" ("Vague Directions").

Indirect Quotation within a cited work - when referring to a quotation within a work not made by the author, write "qtd. in..."

For Example

Bernard Baruch states that "Mankind has always thought to substitute energy for reason" (qtd. in Ringer 274).

NOTE: On your works Cited page you would use Ringer as the author of the work cited, then the title of his book, etc.

Citing two or more works by the same author

When using more than one book by the same author, provide a shortened title of the book in each citation. (The Works Cited or Bibliography will have two separate entries for this author - for the two books cited.)

For Example

Feodor Dostoyevsky declares that the "underground rebel is representative of our society (Underground 3). He seems to confirm this view in Rasholnikov's superman speech (Crime 383-84).

The full titles of the books quoted are: Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment.

When the author's name does not appear in the text, it is placed first within the parentheses followed by a comma, the shortened title, and the page number.

Multivolume Work

When citing a work that has more than one volume, put the author, the volume followed by a colon and a space, and the page number within the parentheses.

For Example

It is interesting to note that while Johann Sebastian Bach composed in the modern era, his use of the polyphonic style was a regression to medieval music (Wallbank and Taylor 2:67).

Citing Web sources that have no page numbers

Web documents generally do not have fixed page numbers or any kind of section numbering. If your source lacks numbering, you cannot cite numbers when you use the source.

If your source includes fixed page numbers or section numbering (such as numbering of paragraphs), cite the relevant numbers.

For numbers other than page numbers, give the appropriate abbreviation before the number. eg. (Moulthrop, pars. 12-20)

(Pars. is abbreviation for paragraphs).

DO NOT count the paragraphs yourself. DO NOT use the page numbers of a printout of an article because the page numbers may vary in different printouts. An exception is PDF files, which appear with the same page numbers on all systems.

• Abbreviations for months used in your bibliography

Jan.    Feb.    Mar.    Apr.    May    June   
July    Aug.    Sept.    Oct.    Nov.    Dec.

•  These samples are adapted from the 1999 Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide. Your guide does not cover all bibliographic citations. If you need further information, consult the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers located at the MLA web site.

• When you are finished with your research, put your bibliography into ALPHABETICAL ORDER.  Use the first word on the card as your guide. (A, An, and The don’t count as first words.) This list of sources is your bibliography. MLA calls the bibliography page a Works Consulted Page.

• Write your bibliography only after all research is completed to be sure that alpha order is maintained.

• Do not number your entries.

• Double-space the entire list, both between and within entries.

• Indent 5 spaces on second line of the entry.  (Do this easily in Microsoft Word:  After all the citations are typed, select them all and then click on Format..Paragraph.  Under Special, choose Hanging; Under By, choose 0.5” and click OK.)

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