Short Research Report

To help you understand the proper use of MLA style in this week's short report, I have attached a draft of the short report by one of your classmates (who tells me that she has previously written papers using MLA style--and it shows!). Please open the attached sample. Look it over carefully, paying particular attention to the following areas relating to MLA style:

· First, go to the end of the report, and notice the Works Cited page; yours, too, should be titled Works Cited, centered at the top of the last page.

· Notice the line spacing on the Works Cited page: double spaced between entries and notice that each of the three source entries uses hanging indentation. Each new entry begins flush with the left margin and any additional lines within a given entry are indented five spaces.

Tip: When you start to type your Works Cited page, preset the page to hanging indentation by going to the paragraph dialog box on the ribbon, and then, in the Indentation group, under Special, select "hanging indentation" from the dropdown menu.

· Notice that the source entries on the Works Cited page are in alphabetical order, by author's last name or the first word of the entry. In the source with no known author, the title of the article, in quotation marks, is the first part of the entry, alphabetized by the first major word of the title.

· Notice the lack of URLs--the website addresses. DO NOT use URLs on the Works Cited page or in the content of your report! That is not proper MLA style.

· Notice the content of each entry, including the punctuation, spacing, use of the medium (Web) and the date of access that ends each entry.

· Now, go back to the content of the report. You will now see how the student writer did her in-text citations. (MLA requires in-text citations of your sources, exactly where you use them in your paper, as well as the Works Cited page. In-text citations are usually very brief--usually just the last name of the author, which is cued to the first part of each entry on the Works Cited page.) Notice that whenever the student writer uses information from her three sources, she puts the name of the author in parentheses at the end of the sentence containing the information. There are not quotation marks around the authors' information in this report--that means the student writer paraphrased (put the author's words into her own phrasing--but still cited the source because ideas, not just exact words, must be given credit in order to avoid plagiarism! When you quote directly from your sources, be sure to use quotation marks).

· Notice, in the content of the report, that the one source without an author was cited as the title of the article--which corresponds to its entry on the Works Cited page--placed in parentheses, just like the author's last names, at the end of the sentence that contains the paraphrased material from the source.