Every semester, students become confused about how to cite quotations, and how to format titles in academic papers. This page is designed to help you master the intricacies of MLA formatting for titles and quotations.

Let’s look at quotations first.

Say you wanted to include in your paper this passage from page 78 of Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story”:

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.”

If your sentence mentioned O’Brien by name, as this one does, you’d do it thusly:

As Tim O’Brien writes, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (78).

If not, you’d do it this way:

That loss is made excruciatingly poignant as we read that “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (O’Brien 78).

If your quote is more than 3 lines long, it needs to be blockquoted. This means that you need to introduce it and then indent it once. MLA says to indent only on the left and leave all blockquotes double spaced. I find this to be hideously ugly and unreadable. I single-space my blockquotes, indent once on both sides, and fully justify them. I’m a rebel. Follow me or follow MLA — it’s your call. This is what a blockquote should look something like:

The implications of relativism are inescapable:

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. [....] The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is alwasy that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. (O’Brien 78)

The important things to remember are:

  • Every quotation needs a citation which includes at least the relevant page number.
  • Quotation marks surround the quoted prose, not the parenthetical citation.
  • If the author’s name appears in the sentence, do not include it in the parenthetical citation.
  • The closing punctuation for the sentence appears not at the end of the quotation, but outside the parenthetical citation. This shows that the citation refers backwards to the previous text, rather than forwards to whatever is going to come next in the paragraph.
  • Introduce blockquotes with a colon.
  • For blockquotes — never use quotation marks. The indentation is signal enough that you’re quoting.
  • For blockquotes — the final punctuation goes right after the end of the quoted text (and thus, before the parenthetical citation). Since the parenthetical citation will also be indented, we know it belongs with the blockquote.
  • Blockquotes always need discussion after them. This means that you should never end a paragraph with a blockquote. If you don’t have anything to say about a blockquote, you shouldn’t be including it in your paper.

Now, how about those titles?

Works that appear by themselves always get either italics or underlining (never both). Which you should use is a question that you will answer however your own personal style as a writer dictates. Some people like underlining, others prefer italics. Both are correct. However, whichever form you choose should also be the way you indicate emphasis in your paper. So, if you like underlining titles, then you should underline the important words you really, really want to emphasize in your paper.*

  • Novels: Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or The Crying of Lot 49
  • Films: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining or The Shining
  • Epic poems: Homer’s The Iliad or The Iliad
  • Plays: Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen or Copenhagen
  • Television Series: Seth McFarland’s The Family Guy or The Family Guy
  • Magazines & Journals: People Magazine or People Magazine
  • Web Sites & Blogs: Professor Parent’s Digital Digressions or Digital Digressions
  • CD Titles: U2’s The Joshua Tree or The Joshua Tree

Works that appear in collections always only get quotation marks.

  • Short Stories: Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” (from The Things They Carried)
  • Poems: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (from Howl and Other Poems)**
  • TV Show Episodes: Family Guy Episode 13: “Death is a Bitch”
  • Magazine & Journal Articles: People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive for 1997″
  • Songs: “With or Without You,” from The Joshua Tree
  • Blog Posts: “See, I’m Not Crazy,” from Digital Digressions

    • It’s just that simple.

    These are MLA’s formatting rules. Other style manuals will do things differently, but most English classes and academic journals follow these rules. So learn them.

    * - MLA discourages any and all sort of visual emphases in academic papers. Italicizing or underlining important words or phrases is far too similar to pathos, and far too little like logos to make the Vulcans at MLA comfortable.

    ** - I will admit that I sometimes fudge with the formatting of “Howl.” This is because in my mind it really is a stand-alone poem, a work that should be published by itself, which would mean that it should be either italicized or underlined (never both). However, it isn’t published alone, so it really should be formatted with quotation marks.