MLA Formatting guidelines

Sources

a book, journal article, CD, video, or other work referred to in a research paper and included in a bibliography

Hanging Indent marker

a moveable icon on the horizontal ruler that looks like the bottom half of an hour glass and that can be dragged left or right to change the indent for all the lines of a paragraph except the first line

Right Indent marker

a moveable icon on the horizontal ruler that looks like the bottom half of an hour glass and that can be dragged left or right to indent an entire paragraph from the right side of the document

First Line Indent marker

a moveable icon on the horizontal ruler that looks like the top half of an hour glass and that can be dragged left or right to change the indent for the first line of one or more paragraphs

Citation

a parenthetical reference to a source

Modern Language Association (MLA)

a set of formatting and content guidelines for publications and student research papers in the humanities and other fields

Content Control

a special feature used to display information that is inserted automatically into a document and that may need to be updated later

Left Indent marker

a square, moveable icon on the horizontal ruler that can be dragged left or right to indent an entire paragraph from the left side of the document

American Psychological Association (APA)

a style guide that is designed to help readers scan an article quickly for key points and emphasizes the date of publication in citations

Bibliography

an alphabetical list of all the sources, including books, magazines, Web sites, movies, and other words, referred to in a research paper

Field

an instruction that tells Word to display the source information for all the citations in the document

Citations

are formal references to the work of others

List of works cited

in the MLA style guide, a list of all sources cited in a document

Style guide

is a set of rules that describe the preferred format and style for a certain type of writing

Page number field

is an instruction that tells Word to insert a page number on each page, no matter how many pages you eventually add to the document

Manual page break

is one you insert at a specific location

Hanging indent

is where all lines except the first line of the paragraph are indented from the left margin

Header

text, date or other information that is printed above the top page margin; also, the blank area at the top of a page where such information can be inserted

Footer

text, date, or other information that is printed below the bottom page margin; also, the blank area at the bottom of a page where such information can be inserted