Check Your MLA Works Cited Format

Once you paste your list of MLA citations into your document, correct these things if necessary:

• Your Works Cited page should appear at the end of the paper.

• Works Cited is centered 1 inch from the top of the page.

• Capitalize the first word of each title and all words in the title with the exception of the, at, to, in, a, etc. See Capitalization and Punctuation of Titles page for more details. 

• Double space the list, both between citations and within them.

• When a citation has more than one line, use a hanging indent. To do this, indent the second line, and every line thereafter, to the right one half inch or five spaces.

• Alphabetize the entire list by the first word of each citation. This may be the author's last name or the first word in a title. Ignore these words if they are the first word in a title: a, an, the.

• If two or more citations are by the same author, only include the name in the first entry. Thereafter, in place of the name, type three hyphens, followed by a period and the title. Arrange the works listed under the same name in order alphabetically by title.
  
  Example:
  
  

  Simon, Seymour. Planet Mars. Seastar Books, 2008.

  ---. Stars. Rev. ed., Smithsonian, 2006.

  ---. The Universe. Rev. ed., Smithsonian, 2006.

  Thompson, Stan. The Big Bang Theory. Random House, 2014.

Resources

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021, pp. 5-6, 219-24.

The MLA Style Center: Writing Resources from the Modern Language Association. Modern Language Association of America, 2021, style.mla.org.