Let me show you how to format your essay following the MLA guidelines, 8th edition.
There is some flexibility to these rules, but you do want to follow them fairly closely if you want
to make your teacher happy! The first thing you want to do is make sure that you pick a legible
(readable) font. The default, the standard in the field, is Times New Roman, and that's
what I would recommend: Times New Roman, size 12. After that you want to double space
everything in your essay. So go to the paragraph menu, click on 2.0, and I also recommend that you
remove the space after paragraph, which is sort of an annoying feature of Microsoft Word.
The other thing is to make sure you're left aligning your text, except for the title,
as we'll see in a moment. I can't say how annoying it is when I see text that is
centered, or right aligned, or even justified! Okay, after that fill out some information about
you and the course. You start with your own name, then you provide the professor's name.
Okay, so there's a professor's name. Then the course name and the number, and then the date.
This would be the date when you finish the paper, you're printing it out, or submitting it.
Don't cheat, and you know if your assignment is late, pretend that the date is something else. Just
be honest about it. You have some room here in terms of whether you want to abbreviate the month
or if you want to spell it out. The MLA rules don't really care and you can pick which one you prefer.
Do watch out though, because the date, the day of the month comes first, which is a bit
funny in some ways. Okay, after that we're going to have the title, and, as mentioned,
the title is centered. So "My Title." You can come up with something more creative,
but we'll just use that for now. After that we go back to being left aligned and in this case
we want to start our first paragraph. But we want to press the tab key on the keyboard
in order to start our paragraph with an indent. So start paragraph. Okay, that's our introduction.
And then after that you can make sure that each paragraph
is separated not with extra spacing, but in the same way -- by just pressing the tab key.
Between your sentences you probably want to use only one space. Okay, "next sentence" -- there we go.
It used to be the norm to use two spaces, and it took me a while to get used to the transition,
but nowadays the standard is just one space. Scrolling back up, we want to make sure we have a
header, and there's two ways to access the header. You can double click at the top of
your screen. You can also go to "insert" at the top here: "insert," and press "page number" and we're going
to press on "top of the page" and then pick "plain number three." That would be on the right side of
the header. After that we will write our last name, so the student's last name followed by a space.
Make sure you add that space and then you can format this as well. Right now both of these
things are in Calibri format, as you can see here, so if you do want to format them you can change
them to Times New Roman to match. Just be aware of that. If you want to get out of this this area
you can double click, just as you can double click at the top to get into it. Then the last thing
you need to know is just how to format your Works Cited. Before you start a Works Cited [page]
where you list all your sources, make sure that you insert a page break. So "insert" > "page break,"
and that keeps your Works Cited on a separate page, which is quite important.
Then we want to centre our heading here. We're going to call this Works Cited. If you have only
one entry you will call it Work Cited: take off the "s." And that's the only thing you need
to know here. Press enter, go back to being left aligned, and now we want to include our entries.
Okay, I've just copied an entry here and then the only thing that you need to to know after this
is to make sure that you use hanging indentation. Highlight your entry, or highlight all of them.
You can do this all the same time if you want. Go to paragraph, click on this little icon, and
select special indentation, which in this case is hanging indentation. There we go, and that
ensures that there's a tab space before every line after the first for every single entry.
Often students do it in the reverse order. I don't know why, but make sure that you do it this way.
Then your next entry is just going to start on the next line. So next entry here. That is pretty
much all you need to know for how to format your essay following the MLA guidelines, 8th edition.