Last Name 1 Student Name Instructor Name Course Title 6 March 2011 Original and Creative Title Centered Here This is the proper format for a paper using Modern Language Association (MLA) formatting. Use a Times New Roman or similar font, size 12. Notice that everything on the page is double-spaced. There is no extra spacing before or after the title, nor is the title in bold, in quotes, underlined, or in a larger font size. The paper is aligned on the left side only. There is never any need for extra spacing. For example, when starting a new paragraph, do not press enter again. Extra spacing around paragraphs is not appreciated. Here is a new paragraph. Simply hit enter and then the tab key. Paragraphs are tabbed in half an inch. There are many other rules to note in MLA format. The page margins should be one inch all the way around. In addition, the page number should appear at the top right of each page with the student’s last name. If using Microsoft Word, move your cursor to the very top ½” of the page and double click to bring up the “Header and Footer Tools.” To the right, make sure that the “Header from Top” and “Footer from Bottom” are both at a .5 setting. Next, click on “Page Number.” From there, select “Top of Page” and then select “Plain Number 3.” Type the student’s last name, and press the space bar once to separate the name and page number. You may need to press the “Home” button, and set the font style to Times New Roman, size 12, to match the rest of the paper. You are set now with proper pagination for each page. In this next paragraph, quotations and citations will be addressed. When quoting directly, you should start off with some type of a lead-in or signal phrase. Do not drop in a stand- alone

Last Name 2 quote! Put the information in quotation marks “and then put the last name of the source and the page number in parenthesis after, with the period after that, like so” (Heinicke 29). Notice that there is a space between the quotation mark and the parenthesis, no comma in the citation, and there is a space between the name and the page number. Even if a student is paraphrasing someone else’s work, there should be a citation after it as shown here (Kramer 17). This is proper and extremely important for avoiding plagiarism. If the author is mentioned in the signal phrase, then the author’s name will not be repeated in the parenthesis, so just a page number will do if there is one. When quoting more than four lines, the quote needs to be indented one inch. This should be equivalent to tabbing twice. The quote should be double-spaced like everything else in the paper. The citation will be at the end, but the period will be before the parenthesis. Furthermore, there is generally a colon before a long quote: There is no need for quotation marks because indenting all the information defines it as a quote. Only use quotation marks if quoting dialogue spoken by a character. Some instructors may request that exceedingly long quotes, if needed, be single-spaced. This is not unusual. Many instructors use MLA formatting with a few of their own special rules. Always pay attention to what an instructor requires when writing a paper. Proper MLA is double spaced. (Young 54) Begin the next line back at the one inch margin without any extra spacing between it and the quote. When leaving something out of a quotation, use an ellipsis . . . to signify the omission. An ellipsis is made with three periods that have spaces in between, as shown in the line above. There are some accepted rules for formal writing. Do not use personal pronouns such as I, me, ours, us, you, and your. The focus should not be on the writer of the paper, which is what

Last Name 3 personal pronoun usage causes. Moreover, using a personal pronoun that includes the reader – such as we, us, our, you, your – may imply that a reader shares the opinions of the paper, and he or she may not. Instead of the pronoun “you,” try a plural noun like readers,