Academic essays writing: a few words about MLA style
Writing academic essays can be considered to be a bit easier than writing a research paper, but the truth is that there will still be rules you will have to follow throughout your entire essay. If you study humanities, it is very likely that your teacher has requested you to write the essay in the MLA academic style. If you have worked with this style before, writing this paper will seem easier, but if you have worked with other styles (such as the Harvard style, for example), then you may want to take into consideration the official guidelines of the MLA style. So, unless you want to buy essay online,l here are some of the things you should definitely keep in mind when writing your academic essay in the MLA style:
- Always check the settings of your word processor. The MLA style usually requires you to write the paper with the Times New Roman font (size 12). This may be your default in older versions of word processing software application, but you may have to change it if you are using an newer version.
- Also, do bear in mind the fact that the margins of the paper should be set to one inch and that the spacing should be double. This will be fairly easy to set up, but make sure you do not forget about it.
- Do not forget about the headline either. This should be placed on the top left part of the first page of your essay and it should contain the following (in the same order): your name, your teacher’s name, the subject and the date (day, month, year format).
- Do not style the title of your essay in any way. The MLA style requires you to simply center the title and to use the same fonts and the same size as the rest of the paper.
- Italics are used when you write the titles of movies, TV shows or books and inverted commas are used for TV show episodes, poems, short stories or periodicals.
- Pay attention to how you insert quotes into your essay. Make sure you do introduce the person who has written/said those words and that you use inverted commas. Also, bear in mind that you should not use a period to end the quotation marks.
- The MLA style uses in-text citations. Every time you have to credit someone for an idea, insert the author’s name and the page at which the idea can be found in between brackets.