How to format an essay in MLA style

MLA is the usual house style for English, literature and the humanities. There is no title page, which surprises people coming from APA.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 7 min read

MLA style comes from the Modern Language Association and the current edition is the 9th, published in 2021. It did not change much from the 8th — the core idea, that you describe a source using a standard set of elements rather than memorising a template per source type, carried straight over.

Page setup

Margins	1 inch (2.54 cm) all round
Line spacing	Double, throughout, with no extra space between paragraphs
Font	A readable font whose italics are clearly different from the regular style. 12 pt Times New Roman is the safe default
Paragraphs	First line indented 0.5 inch
Header	Your surname and the page number, top right of every page
Title page	None, unless you are told otherwise

The first page

Instead of a title page, MLA uses a four-line block in the top left corner of page one, double spaced like everything else. Then the title, centred, in plain text — not bold, not italic, not underlined, not in quotation marks.

Top of page one

Amara Okafor
Dr Helen Marsh
ENG 210
20 September 2026

The Unreliable Narrator in Modern Short Fiction

The date is written day-month-year. The header in the top right corner — Okafor 1 — appears on page one as well, including the page the four-line block is on.

In-text citations

MLA is an author–page style. No year appears in the citation, which is the most visible difference from APA.

Parenthetical

The narrator's account collapses in the final paragraph (Okafor 47).

Narrative

Okafor argues that the narrator's account collapses in the final paragraph (47).

Note there is no comma between the name and the page number. Other cases:

Two authors: (Okafor and Lin 47) — the word “and”, not an ampersand.
Three or more: (Okafor et al. 47).
No author: use a shortened form of the title in quotation marks or italics, matching how it appears in the Works Cited entry.
No page numbers (a web page, for instance): give just the author — (Okafor). Do not invent a page number, and do not cite a paragraph number unless the source numbers them itself.
Two works by the same author: add a short title — (Okafor, “Unreliable” 47).

A quotation of more than four lines is set as a block: indented 0.5 inch, double spaced, no quotation marks, with the full stop before the citation.

Works Cited

The list starts on a new page. Works Cited is centred in plain text at the top. Entries are alphabetical by the first author's surname, double spaced, with a hanging indent.

MLA 9 builds each entry from nine optional elements, in this fixed order. You include the ones that exist for your source and skip the rest:

Author.
Title of source.
Title of container,
Other contributors,
Version,
Number,
Publisher,
Publication date,
Location.

The “container” is whatever holds the source — the journal that holds an article, the anthology that holds a story, the website that holds a page. Note the punctuation: each element ends with a full stop or a comma exactly as shown above.

Journal article

Okafor, Amara. “The Unreliable Narrator in Modern Short Fiction.” Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2024, pp. 114–29. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1000/jls.2024.114.

Book

Marsh, Helen. Reading Modern Fiction. 3rd ed., Riverbank Press, 2021.

Chapter or story in an anthology

Ibrahim, Sara. “The Quiet Hour.” New Northern Stories, edited by Kwame Doyle, Northgate, 2022, pp. 201–24.

Web page

Okafor, Amara. “How Narrators Lie.” The Literary Review, 14 Mar. 2023, www.example.com/how-narrators-lie.

Details that trip people up:

Titles are in title case in MLA — unlike APA, which uses sentence case.
Only the first author is inverted. A second author is written forename first: Okafor, Amara, and Tomas Lin.
Three or more authors: first author inverted, then et al.
Page ranges are abbreviated where the numbers allow: 114–29, not 114–129.
Months longer than four letters are abbreviated: Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec. May, June and July are written in full.
URLs are given without http:// or https://. Prefer a DOI when the source has one.

A checklist before you submit

Surname and page number top right on every page
Four-line block top left of page one, then a centred plain title
Double spacing everywhere, Works Cited included
Citations give author and page, with no comma between them
Works Cited alphabetical, hanging indent, titles in title case
Every source cited in the text appears in the list, and nothing else does