Let me show you how to format your essay following the MLA guidelines (9th edition).
I'm using Microsoft Word, but you can adapt this to other word processing programs as
well. The first thing I'll do is select a font. So I'm going to select Times New Roman in this case,
and pick size 12. That's my personal preference, but you can pick any "readable font" -- whatever
that means. If you are doing something unusual you might want to check with your instructor,
but you do have quite a bit of choice here. Then I need to double space everything (2.0)
and remove the "space after paragraph," which is this annoying feature that Microsoft Word has.
Once we have set things up, we can start typing out some personal information. So in this case I'm
going to start with my name. Let's say my name is Iris Smith. Then I add the professor's name
underneath: so Professor Jones, let's say. You could also format it differently, as in Dr.
Sam Jones, let's say, and then we add the course (English 101), and the date. Let's say this is 7
january 2022. Notice that I've spelt out the month and I've done it in the order of day, month, year,
with no commas in between. Once this information section is done, you can add your essay title.
We're going to center this, and I'm going to call my essay "Hand Washing
in Macbeth," as a sample title. Notice that Macbeth is italicized, because it's the title
of a play -- a longer work of literature -- but otherwise you don't really have to add special
formatting to your essay [title]. You don't need to use bold font or underlining or any any kind
of bigger size. There's nothing special about your title -- just keep it like the rest of your essay.
Do make sure, however, that you capitalize important words.
So the words "hand," "washing," and Macbeth" are capitalized, but not the little preposition
"in." That's our title. After that we press "enter." We're going to go back to
left align text. So we go back to the left and we indent our first paragraph. Okay,
so we indented one tab space and we'll just write "our first paragraph (starts here)."
And then after that every single paragraph is indented one tab space.
After that we need to add a header, so we're going to double click in the header area. You could also
simply go to "insert page" > "insert page number," which we have to do anyways. And then we click
"top of the page" and "page number three." There's our page number. This will automatically show up
on every page, and it will change accordingly. We also add our last name--in this case Smith. Press
Ctrl + A, which highlights everything, and we format it in the same way as the rest of our essay
(our choice was Times New Roman size 12). But it could be something different
obviously. Once that's done we're going to double click in the main part of our page.
We've set up the formatting for the first page and the next thing to do is to add a Works Cited page.
I'm going to insert a page break to make sure that our Works Cited stays on its own page.
After that I will center the title for the Works Cited. I'm going to call it Works Cited,
but you can also call it Work Cited without the "s" if you only have one single entry.
We press "enter" again. We left align. Then our first entry starts. Okay,
so the first bibliographic entry will start here, and the only thing we have
to add yet is hanging indentation. So we click on "paragraph." There we go:
"special" and "hanging." Press "okay" and we're good to go. Now, you don't see anything yet,
but as you keep typing every line after the first for each entry will be indented one tab space.
If you've already set up your Works Cited, you can do this after the fact as well.
Highlight all the text, press hanging indentation, and voila! The formatting will be done for you.
The last thing I'd like to do is talk a little bit about is how to format your first page if you have
multiple contributors. There's not much different here. First of all, make sure that you add your
other contributors. Let's say that John Brooks is helping you out as well. Any other contributors
can be added underneath and you just keep typing. And then you're going to have a separate title
page in this case. So just make sure that your title is in the center of your page roughly.
Then put your first paragraph on a new page. I'll just insert a page break here
and indent it one tab space again. And then the last thing to do is go back to your header area
and you want to make sure that your first page is different from the rest.
Now it's gone and your first page is set up. And that's all there's to it. That is it for
formatting your essay using the MLA guidelines, ninth edition.