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The Modern Language Association (MLA) is a leading professional organization that promotes the scholarship and teaching of language and literature. MLA offers a variety of resources, publications, and standards for research and writing in the humanities.
Students often encounter MLA when asked to complete academic writing assignments in MLA style, which is frequently utilized in disciplines such as English and literature.
To learn more about MLA as an organization and as a style guide, visit the official MLA website:
Writers use in-text citations (sometimes called parenthetical citations) to give credit to quoted, paraphrased, or summarized source material. In MLA style, there are two required pieces of information to include in an in-text citation:
How these pieces of information are formatted in an essay depends on whether or not the writer uses a signal phrase to introduce the upcoming source, as shown in the examples below.
| Signal Phrase Introducing Source | No Signal Phrase Introducing Source |
|---|---|
| Carr argues, "We need to give our minds more room to think" (426). |
It is argued that people "need to give [their] minds more room to think" (Carr 426). |
To learn more about formatting MLA in-text citations in your writing, visit these highly respected websites:
A Works Cited page, which is an alphabetical list of all sources that are cited throughout your essay, will be the last page of your paper.
MLA style has specific guidelines for how to format each type of source on your Works Cited page. To learn how to format MLA Works Cited entries for different types of sources, visit these highly respected websites:
