Why is MLA Citation Important?
There are two main styles of representing a format of a research paper or any written content. They are APA (American psychological association) and MLA (Modern language association) styles. The writing formats apply for writing in Encyclopedias, Journals, Magazine, Newspapers and web pages. MLA style of writing is used mostly in literature and media fields. When a research paper is written, any idea or phrase that is taken from any source has to be mentioned along with its source reference in the paper. When any single word or phrase or sentence is included in your essay or research paper, it is important to mention about the reference for the source. This is called citation of the text. Citations can be done in different ways, in various types of formatting styles available.
MLA formatting style of citation is used mostly in the field of humanities. The department of humanities includes English, history, and arts. MLA style of citations mainly includes two forms. The first form is ‘in-text citation’ and the second form is ‘Works Cited’ page. The in-text citation includes the author name, accompanied by the page number in which the current sentence is referred to. These two forms of citation will allow the reader to know first about the author and later search for the total details about the author in the ‘Works Cited’ page. It is necessary to take care that the author name spelling that is given in the in-text citation should match with that given in the detailed references.
The MLA citation includes Harvard parenthetical referencing too. The citation format of MLA style includes sequentially Author’s names, title of the article, source of the title, identification of editor, publisher, date of publication, referenced pages, date accessed, and the URL for accessing the article in the website. To have a better idea about the formatting of MLA citation in various types of articles, the URL given below might guide anyone to follow MLA citation.