MLA Format: The Heading, the Header, and the Works Cited List

Almost everyone searching for the MLA heading is looking for one of two things, and the words for them are nearly identical. The heading is the four-line block that appears once, at the top of the first page. The header, also called the running head, is the short line that repeats on every page including the first.

Getting them confused is the most common MLA formatting error, and it is why a paper can look wrong while every individual element is correct.

• The heading: your name, your instructor's name, the course, and the date, each on its own line, flush left in the upper-left corner, double-spaced like the rest of the paper.
• The header: your last name followed by a space and the page number, in the upper-right corner, half an inch from the top of the page.
• The heading appears once. The header appears on every page.
• MLA uses no separate title page by default. The heading sits at the top of the first page of the essay itself, and the title follows it.

Everything below is the default MLA layout. An instructor or department can override any of it, and their instruction wins. Where a course sheet and this page disagree, follow the course sheet.

1. Set one-inch margins on all four sides.
2. Double-space the entire document, including the heading, the title, block quotations, and the works-cited list. There are no extra blank lines anywhere.
3. Choose a legible font in which the regular and italic styles are clearly distinguishable, at a readable size. Twelve point is the usual choice.
4. Put the four-line heading flush left at the top of the first page: your name, the instructor's name, the course, then the date.
5. Centre the title on the next line. Use title case, and no bold, italics, underlining, or quotation marks. Do not enlarge it.
6. Begin the essay on the line after the title, with each paragraph's first line indented half an inch.
7. Put your last name and the page number in the upper-right header, half an inch from the top, on every page.

MLA in-text citations give the author's surname and the page number, with nothing between them. No comma, no p., no year. That is the whole pattern: (Shannon 379).

Writers arriving from APA reach for (Shannon, 1948, p. 379) and writers arriving from IEEE reach for a bracketed number. Neither is MLA, and the missing comma is the single most frequent mechanical error.

• Parenthetical: (Shannon 379). One space, no punctuation between name and number.
• Named in the sentence: Shannon argues that communication can be modelled mathematically (379). The surname is not repeated in the parentheses.
• Two authors: (Tversky and Kahneman 1124). MLA spells out and rather than using an ampersand.
• Three or more authors: the first author's surname followed by et al., as in (Jumper et al. 583).
• No page numbers, as on most web pages: give the author alone, as in (Shannon). Do not invent a locator.
• Two works by the same author: add a shortened title, as in (Shannon, Mathematical Theory 379).

MLA's ninth edition does not give a separate template for every source type. It gives one ordered list of core elements, and you supply the ones your source has. This is the central idea of modern MLA, and it is why the style handles a podcast episode or a social media post without needing a new rule for each.

The second idea is the container. When a source sits inside a larger whole, that whole is its container: a short story inside an anthology, an article inside a journal, an episode inside a series. MLA's own example is exactly that anthology case. A source can have two containers, as with a journal article inside a database.

1. Author. Surname first for the first author.
2. Title of source. In quotation marks for a work inside a container; italicised when the work is self-contained.
3. Title of container. Italicised.
4. Other contributors, such as editors or translators.
5. Version or edition.
6. Number, such as a volume and issue.
7. Publisher.
8. Publication date.
9. Location: page range, DOI, or URL.

The list begins on a new page at the end of the paper, titled Works Cited, centred, in plain text with no formatting. It is alphabetised by the first element of each entry, which is usually the author's surname.

• Alphabetise by the first element. An entry with no author alphabetises by its title, ignoring a leading A, An, or The.
• Use a hanging indent: the first line flush left, every subsequent line indented half an inch.
• Double-space throughout, with no extra space between entries.
• Include an entry for every source cited in the text, and cite in the text every source listed.
• Give a DOI as a doi.org address when the source has one. Use a URL only when there is no DOI, and omit the https:// prefix per MLA's guidance.