For a breakdown of rules for MLA formatting, your go-to source is the MLA Style Manual. (This is available to borrow through the Centenary library, and should be available at all times at the reference desk, I believe.) As a secondary route, I highly recommend visiting the Purdue OWL’s MLA Formatting and Style Guide. This guide provides examples and explanations for many different source types – journal articles, websites with no author names, online videos, tweets, newspaper articles, etc.

Here, I’m giving you just the basics so you know what to look for.

A citation for a book is one of the two most basic citations. Here is a citation for Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander’s Understanding Rhetoric:

A citation for an online scholarly journal article is the second most basic citation. An example of this kind of source is Nancy Sommer’s“The Revision Strategies of Student Writers…”:

Websites are also a type of source that you will most likely be using in other papers you write this semester. The citations for these will vary greatly, since the information you’re able to obtain about each website (e.g. author, publication date, etc.) will vary greatly. Here is an example of a webpage from the online comic The Oatmeal’s website; no date was available, but I know the author’s name and the title of the specific webpage:

I offer more tips for citing sources in my APA post. As you think about citing sources, remember to use in-text or parenthetical citations in addition to the ones you provide on your Works Cited or Reference page. I’ll create a similar post for APA and MLA in-text citations soon!