SLK Learning Center

1. Italicizing titles—You must italicize titles of books, plays, films, online databases, operas and other long musical compositions, works of visual art, pamphlets, periodicals, web sites, record albums, CDs, audiocassettes, ships, aircraft, and spacecraft: e.g., Hamlet (play); Moll Flanders (novel); PMLA (journal)

• Sound recordings, speeches, presentations, titles of (short) poems, as well as titles of articles, chapters in edited anthologies, and recorded television episodes, are NOT italicized. They are put in quotations.
  • However, epic poems, like The Iliad, are italicized because it is a work unto itself.

2. Citing drama—If you quote dialogue between two or more characters in a play, set the quotation off from your text. The character’s name should also be in all capital letters and indented one inch from the margin:

            A short time later Lear loses the final symbol of his former power, the soldiers who make up his train:

            GONERIL:                                     Hear me, my lord.

            What need you five-and-twenty, ten or five,

            To follow in a house where twice so many

            Have a command to tend you?

            REGAN                                           What need one?

            LEAR                  O, reason not the need! (2.4.254-58)

3. Quotation omitting a sentence: Use an ellipsis with four periods to indicate the omission of one or more sentences: 

“In ‘Outsiders in Shakespeare’s England,’Ania Loomba writes: 'New World, African, or Eastern peoples were widely believed not only to be more libidinous than Europeans but also to indulge in same-same erotic practices and to live in strange familial arrangements involving harems, polygamy, wife-sharing, and occasionally polyandry….Descriptions of African or Turkish ‘tribades’ were evoked to police same-sex eroticism in England, and fed into the construction of the ‘lesbian’ in Europe'” (152).

• Quotation with an ellipsis in the middle does not require four periods.

4. Format of paper—Heading and Title: Beginning one inch from the top and flush with the left margin, type your name, your instructor’s name, the course number, and the date on separate, double-spaced lines. Center title after heading. Do not italicize or underline your title, put it in quotation marks or boldface, or type it in all capital letters. Only italicize words that you would italicize in the text:

Jane Smith

Professor Doe

English 101: Shakespeare

22 October 2011

Performative Interpretation and Imagination:

Isabella’s Choice in Measure for Measure

• Do not include/write a title page unless instructed to do so.

5. Page numbers: Number all pages consecutively throughout the research paper in the upper right-hand corner, one-half inch from the top and flush with the right margin. Type your last name before the page number: e.g., Smith 2

6. Works Cited page: This page appears at the end of the paper. Begin the list with a new page and number each page, continuing the page numbers of the text. Alphabetize entries in the list of works cited by the author’s last name. The order of names is determined by the letters before the commas that separate last names and first names.

• Like the heading and title page, there should be one-inch margins all around. Begin at left margin, double-space entry between title and first entry, and center the title—in this case, Works Cited:

                                                   Works Cited

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain

Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1973.

Print.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Print.

7. See Purdue’s Online Writing Lab for more detailed examples and explanations: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/

• You can also purchase or borrow the most recent MLA Handbook.