Want some practice creating MLA Citations? Here are some quick, fun games to help you practice.
MLA 8th Edition Drag and Drop: Drag and drop elements of a citation to create MLA Citations for a Book.
Citation Game Page for both MLA and APA from the University of Washington with a variety of games.
MLA Style Center - Examples of 5 Basic Citation formats
MLA stands for Modern Language Association, which is the professional organization for scholars of language and literature. MLA publishes an academic journal and requires those who publish within it to follow specific formatting guidelines. These professional standards were used first by professors publishing in the journal, and then adopted by the same for use in the classroom. Eventually, these rules became a style guide that is the publication standard for the Humanities.
Following a common set of standards gives scholars a template for writing clear citations, which in turn allow the reader to access the resources the citations reference. We can learn the format for citation types and plug the information from our sources easily once we know these templates. This page gives examples of common types of citations, first in the format by the information type (author, title, etc.) and followed by concrete examples. It also provides outside resources for more information on the MLA Style.
A citation is reliable way to lead your reader back to the materials you used in your research.
A citation gives credit to an author for their research, writings and ideas.
When you use citations you are
Part of your citation will be integrated into your own writing. You will need to let your readers know when you borrow words or ideas from someone else. This is called an in-text citation. It will look something like this: "Throughout many periods of history—perhaps most—it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater" (Bryson 382).
If you include the author's name in your own writing, you can eliminate it from the parenthetical citation. Bryson mocks fashion when he writes, "it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater" (382).
I wrote the first part of the sentence. Bryson's words are enclosed in quotation marks.
You will provide your reader with more information about your source at the end of your paper.
At the end of your paper, you will have a list of all the sources you reference in your paper. This page is called "Works Cited." All entries on the Works Cited page should be alphabetized by authors' last names (unless no author is indentified) and should be presented using hanging indents. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University has a good overview of how to craft a Works Cited page.
The citation for the book I cited above would look like this:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Doubleday, 2010.
Most databases contain tools to help you create correctly formatted citations for a particular article. One of the advantages of using databases over search engines is the ease of creating and exporting citations. Below are some examples of popularly used databases and how to create and export citations from selected articles.
One easy way to get a copy of the citation is to email the citation and the article to yourself. Other options are listed below with detailed instructions for each database.
To export citations from Academic Search Complete EBSCOoa: