If you're writing a research paper using the MLA format, the first thing you want to do
is check your margins.
They should be one inch all the way around.
You can see by looking at the ruler that the horizontal margins are one inch here and over
to the right they're also an inch.
But, you can't see the vertical so in order to see all of them, go to File and do Page
setup and make sure you have it on 8.5 x 11 paper and that all of the margins are an inch.
Once those two things are right, click okay.
Then when you're back at your paper you also want to have your last name and the page number
as a header.
Click once above the body of your text.
It'll put your cursor in the header.
We're gonna start over on this one.
Let's hit backspace.
Type your last name and then after it go to Insert, Header and page number and then do
page number and use the option that shows the one and the two.
What that's saying is that it's going to start numbering on the first page where you are
right now and then just go sequential after that.
If you select that, you see it put in the 1 and has a little gray background.
That gray background tells you that that number is dynamic.
So, when you scroll down to the second page, it's going to be a 2.
Google Docs is thinking about that number, putting in the right page number on each page.
That should take care of all your pages unless you actually go into one of the other headers
and edit them so to try not do that.
Just let that go like that.
Then you need to have this specific header.
You need to have your name, your professors name, the subject name, and then the date
with the day first at the leading 0 if you need one, the month, and the year.
You also need to have your paper double-spaced.
If I go to this first line and I hit the down arrow it goes all the way down to the P. I've
set this up where I'm not hitting Enter twice after every line.
I've told the entire document to be double-spaced.
Assuming you've typed everything you need to change it, select everything.
Hold down the ctrl key and type A so you have all your text selected and go to the double
spacing.
You'll find the double spacing up in the menus.
Go to Format and line spacing and then just choose double spacing.
That'll take care of everything.
Go back down and you'll notice the report title's first line.
You have to have that centered.
These are your different alignment choices for the title.
Just Center it.
When you get into the body of your text you see each new paragraph is indented.
In order to make sure that the data is there, I go to Format and go to align and indent.
Let's look at your indentation options.
Use a special set up here where you say the first line, it's a half an inch, and click
apply.
Make sure you apply that to every paragraph in the body.
I would start with the first one, scroll down to make sure you capture all your paragraphs.
The next thing you want to make sure, let's reselect all of these paragraphs, and we want
to make sure it's not justified.
You don't want this right hand side lining up.
In order to line it up, it'll put in some make up spacing in between the words here,
but we want all of this to be just natural spacing.
When you come over to the right, it won't be even.
That's called left align.
You don't want to have it on justify.
For the actual text itself, let's select everything.
Do control A.
The MLA specifies that it should be a readable text, but if you want to be safe, just make
it Times New Roman.
If you look down at the bottom, it has Times New Roman checked.
Make it 12 points.
Make everything in there 12 points.
It's very standard.
Then we'll go into the works cited page.
If we scroll down the document to the end, where the works cited page is, you're going
to notice that it's already indented.
But, it's not the type of indent that you want.
Before we dig into this, make sure that you can see your horizontal ruler.
If you can't, go to View and make sure Show Ruler is checked.
Now, left-click at the top and select all of the lines that you want for your works
cited.
Just don't select the title of the page.
These changes that we do are just going to affect what we highlighted, it won't affect
the indent of the rest of the report.
There are two marks here on the ruler.
One of them is your first line indent.
One of them is the left indent.
For a hanging indent, we want to reverse these.
Left-click on the downwards pointing arrow and take that over to half an inch.
Then, left-click on the rectangle and take that back to zero.
Now, when you look, the first line is aligned at zero at the edge of the margin.
But, the second line has the subsequent lines indented.
One thing to keep in mind here, is that you can't have an enter key at the end of these
lines if they're supposed to be more than one line.
So, at the end of "Print", you would have used the enter key and then Docs would have
known that that also does not get indented.
But, at the end of this line, you just use a space and you keep on typing and then Docs
will know that this gets the hanging indent.
If this was three lines, you would do the same thing.
You would just type all the way, the third line would come down and still be indented.
That should be basically all.
The hanging indent is here, if you come back up to the body of your document, it's the
regular indentation that we went over.
You report now has the basic formatting.
I hope that was helpful.
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