Let's talk about how you can format your
essay following the MLA guidelines (eighth
edition). Now these rules
have some flexibility to them, but I
would try to follow them as closely as
possible, especially if you're in the
arts, and your instructor asks you to
format your essay in this way. So the first
thing we want to do is make sure that we
have the right font selected. So you want
to go to font, Times New Roman, and make
it size 12 font. Don't try to cheat and
change the size of your font so
that you can get the word count right
and so on -- just stick to the rules.
Next thing, we want to make sure that all
our text is double spaced, so we'll
click on 2.0. And the other
thing to notice is that we want to click
on "Remove Space After Paragraph."
Microsoft Word has this annoying feature
where they tend to add extra spaces when
you press ENTER, and we don't necessarily
want that.
Now we're going to add some
information about ourselves. So we're
going to start with our own name--
let's just call ourselves John Smith--
then we'll press ENTER. We'll put in the
professor's name--
professor Zach Jones --
and then the course name, so
English 101, let's say, and the date --
January 27, 2017.
So that's fairly straightforward. It's
the same format in every paper: your name,
professor's name, course, and the date. And
the date is bit flexible, so most people
like that date to be the date when you
finished, when you printed it out, some
people like the due date, but I think I
would go when you actually finished it
because it looks a little bit funny if
you hand in your work late, and then you
still have the due date on the piece of
paper.
So we've got this part figured
out. Now we also want a header that shows
up everywhere. So if you want to access
the header area, you just double
click at the top of your screen, and it
will open up.
And then we want to insert a page number,
so we'll go to "Insert," and then we're
going to click on "Page Number," "Top of
Page," and now we want "Plain Number 3."
The cursor nicely shows up right
before our page number, so we'll just press the
space for a second, and then we're going
to put our last name there, which would
be "Smith" in this case. I guess we have to
press the space after actually. So
there's our last name and the page
number, and we'll double click elsewhere
on the screen to get out of this area, so
there we are.
And now this shows up on every page, so
if we scroll down, you'll be able to see
it on every page. Well, there's no extra
page yet, but it will appear eventually.
Next thing we want to do is we want
to add a title. So we're going to go down
here, press Enter,
we're going to center our title, and then
we'll type in our title ... we'll just call it "My
Amazing Title" for now. And we want to
capitalize keywords in the title, so you
would capitalize pronouns, nouns, adjectives,
but not tiny words like prepositions and
articles. Don't try to change the
font size or use bold font or color for
your title, just keep it the way it is
and it'll look just fine.
We're going to press ENTER again,
we're going to left align, and then we
start our first paragraph here but we're
going to indent our first paragraph. So
we press Tab, and then we'll start our
paragraph here ("start intro") and you can
keep typing. Eventually you're going to come to
your thesis statement,
typically the last sentence or two of
your introduction. And then when you
start your second paragraph, again you
indent, so this would be your second
paragraph. And if you have
an extra space between these
paragraphs, then try to get rid of it. So
there's no extra space here, but if you
did have to do that, you can go back to
your line spacing options, and then
if the option appears there to remove
that space, then you can press on that. So
again, make sure that you don't have
extra spaces between paragraphs. The
exception is if your
instructor wants you to not have a tab
space but have an extra space, then you
can do that, but that's fairly uncommon
and is perhaps more normal for things
like writing online because it's
sometimes a bit trickier to insert
paragraph breaks in HTML. So far so
good. We're going to write the rest of
our essay. And then at the end of your essay, you
want to insert a page break.
And your work cited page will
go on a separate page. You can see by the
way that our header does show up right
now, so that's nice.
Now when we add our works cited, we're going to go
back to home, and we're going to center it, and then
we can add our works cited here. And
then when we press ENTER and left align
again, then we would start our first
entry on this side. And if you follow the
MLA guidelines, everything is double
spaced. So as soon as you set up the
parameters that you double space
everything, you don't have to worry about
that, and you don't have to add extra
spaces between the entries.
That's it for how to format your essay
using the MLA Guidelines (eighth edition). Try to
follow the rules, and if you do I think
your instructor will be mighty pleased
with you.