Like other professional titles, military ranks are omitted before authors’ names in entries and when the authors are mentioned in prose, but you may indicate an author’s rank in a description: William C. Westmoreland, a former United States Army general, describes his experiences in Vietnam in A Soldier Reports.
Published 14 August 2018
Published 31 July 2018
The language that you use to describe elements in your works-cited list should be the language that your paper is written in, which should also determine the punctuation used. In other words, if your paper is in Spanish but you cite a work published in English in the works-cited list, use “editado por” instead of . . .
Published 17 May 2018
No. “Sic” is only used to indicate an error in the original, not unusual styling.
Published 14 May 2018
The MLA Handbook explains that you should “[i]dentify an omission within a sentence by using three periods with a space before each and a space after the last ( . . . )” (81). Note, however, that if you use Microsoft Word’s ellipsis character, the periods will not be spaced, and if you try to insert . . .
Published 10 May 2018
Mention the author of the section you are citing in a signal phrase. For clarity, you might indicate the name of the section in your prose, especially if an author writes more than one section: In “Faculty Members, Accommodation, and Access in Higher Education,” Rosemary Garland-Thomson writes, in the section The Changing Profession: “Accommodating . . .
Published 30 April 2018
Since you should never begin a sentence with a numeral, you should first try to reword the sentence. If you find it unwieldy to reorder your words, spell out the number: Seventy-six percent of the class barely passed the final, 18% flunked miserably, and 6% burst into tears. Normally you shouldn’t mix words and numerals, . . .
Published 19 April 2018
The MLA Handbook gives examples of how original publication information can be provided as an optional element in a works-cited-list entry (53). But MLA style generally avoids annotating works-cited-list entries: if information is important for the reader to know, it belongs in your discussion or in a note. For example, let’s say that you quote . . .
Published 21 March 2018
Writers sometimes cause confusion by failing to make the elements in their writing parallel . . .
Published 20 March 2018
You can express a number range using words (“from . . . to”): The party will take place from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Or you can use an en dash: The party will take place 6 p.m.–10 p.m. But you cannot combine words (“from”) and an en dash to convey a range: The party will take place from . . .
Published 14 March 2018
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