Formatting

Occasionally in upper level ESL writing classes and Developmental English classes, and certainly in English comp classes, it is necessary to write research and term papers. The style that most teachers expect students to use is the MLA style. This is a formatting style developed by the  Modern Language Association. You might ask what formatting is.  Well, formatting is a way to make sure that every paper that a writer submits is similar, therefore easier to read and critique.  Imagine if one person handed in a paper with no reference to the documents that provided the information for the paper. It would be impossible for a teacher, scholar, or another student to verify the information. It is important in a research paper to formally acknowledge where and when you retrieved information. As a result, when someone is reading your paper, he or she can look at your Works Cited page and find your sources, which will be listed in alphabetical order based on the author or editor's last name, or if that is not available, the first word of the title.  Let's look at some parts of a document formatted in MLA style.
Notice in the page above that the title of the paper is centered and all words are capitalized except for articles and prepositions inside the title.  If an article or preposition comes first in the title, you always capitalize it.  You can find more information about capitalization in the Spelling and Punctuation section of this site.  Also, book titles are underlined.  Lastly, when you make a reference to a source in your Works Cited page--shown below--you place the author's last name and the page referred to in parentheses.  Here we see (Said 53).  If you make another reference to the same work before you reference any other work, you can just put the page number in parentheses, such as (54). 
You can see in the sample Works Cited page above that the style is very formal. This means you cannot make up your own style. The spacing and punctuation should be exact. There is more to know about in-text citation, which we looked at briefly in the first document above. To help you with that here is another link to help you.