Should periods be used with degrees (e.g., B.A.)?
Practice varies. As indicated in section 1.6 of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook, MLA style does not use periods between letters for abbreviations composed… Read More
Practice varies. As indicated in section 1.6 of the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook, MLA style does not use periods between letters for abbreviations composed… Read More
MLA style, which follows Merriam-Webster, does not use hyphens after most prefixes. We would write, for example, antiestablishment, coauthor, nonlinear, and prealgebra. A hyphen is needed, however, before a capital letter… Read More
MLA style aims to make in-text citations as unobtrusive as possible, so we normally recommend placing them at the end of a sentence, but sometimes… Read More
You should place an exclamation point or a question mark after the parenthetical reference for a paraphrase: Why did Karl Marx say that a commodity is… Read More
When a verb in a quotation does not fit syntactically into your sentence, you may use brackets to change the tense: If Charles Dickens were… Read More
In the MLA Handbook and examples of student writing on The MLA Style Center, hyphens are used in page ranges since hyphens may be easier for students… Read More
If a direct question contained in a sentence is long or has internal punctuation, set the question off with a comma and begin it with a capital… Read More
How you punctuate quoted dialogue from a novel will depend on what you are quoting and how you are quoting it. See the three most… Read More
Yes. Clarity is worth the trouble of more punctuation. Let’s say you quote the following two lines of poetry: He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,… Read More
The MLA Handbook notes, “By convention, commas and periods that directly follow quotations go inside the closing quotation marks” (267). Thus, in the following sentence, the comma… Read More