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Normally, when you quote from a source, your reader is to assume that any styling, such as italics or punctuation in the quotation, is in the original . . .
No. Since hyphens are not needed to prevent misreading, we recommend that they be omitted.
Read more about how the MLA treats mid compounds. . . .
Published 29 September 2020
Unless a place name is at the end of a sentence and followed by sentence-ending punctuation, whenever you list a city and a state or a . . .
Writers may have been taught to add a comma to a sentence when it seems natural to have a pause. Such commas are rhetorical, meaning that they " . . .
Determining when to insert a comma before a phrase or clause that begins with because requires thoughtful analysis. In this post, I'll walk you . . .
Semicolons should be used before coordinating conjunctions—that is, terms such as and, or, and but joining independent clauses—when the . . .
As the MLA Handbook (sec. 1.5) explains, when writing dates, you should "be consistent in your use of either the day-month-year style ( . . .
MLA style hyphens grade levels in adjective form but not in noun form: a third-grade student, a student in third grade, . . .
Like some other punctuation marks, parentheses are used in prose to set apart some text in a sentence, such as an explanation, observation, aside, or digression. Text . . .
The series Microsoft Word and MLA Style shows writers how to use Word to make their essays conform to MLA style guidelines . . .
