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
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
The MLA style discourages the use of italics in academic prose to emphasize or point, because they are unnecessary—most often, the unadorned words do the… 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
A modern editorial style keeps capitalization to a minimum. In MLA style, a movement or school of thought is only capitalized when it could be confused… 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
Should you write, “Happy New Year,” “Happy new year,” or “Happy New Year’s”? . . . Read More
Where to place however when it means “but” or “in spite of that” Read More
To determine how to style an online work, consider the work's length, genre, and context . . . 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