5 Tricks for Writing & Formatting a Research Paper: MLA Template

You can easily write a good MLA formatted paper if you have the right information on how to go about it. Ask experts and they will tell you what you need to do to be successful at what you are writing about. To start off with, here are 5 useful tricks for an outline template for MLA research paper that you may use:-

• General settings for your paper.

Make sure you set all your margins to 1 inch. Again, use double spacing for your lines and size-12 font in your writing.

• Title block and Title of your paper.

An MLA formatted paper does not have a page dedicated to the title of your paper and other personal details. Therefore, it is important to note how to go about putting these important details in an MLA format. Essentially, you should have a title bock to the top left side of your paper showing your name, the name of your tutor, the course number and the date of the assignment.

Just below the block showing your personal details and those defining the course, write your paper title. Note that the title of your paper should be very informative and aligned to the center of the page. Essentially, your writing starts from the same page of the title block.

• Page Headers.

Headers are very distinct to a given formatting style. They are one of the most distinguishing elements of a formatting style. Therefore, your MLA format cannot be complete without making a consideration of this and how it is done. Ideally, the header in an MLA format includes your Surname followed by the page number located at the top right corner of each page.

• Citations

Making correct citations is very important and doing them in the right format as required will help you achieve a lot during the final grading of your paper. Essentially, in-text citations usually contain the author’s surname and the page number. A point to note is that, these citations are not separated by comas. For example, write (Allan 123) where Allan is the Surname and “123” the page number. Periods come after the parenthesis.

• Works Cited

All sources cited in your work should appear on the list of works cited, usually at the end of your paper. Failure to list any of the used references inside your text will attract unnecessary penalties that would otherwise have been avoided. Once you have gotten at least two names of all the authors, the title of the sources, the place of publication, the publishing Company and the page numbers, list each in this order. You should start with the Surname followed by other names separated by a comma. Lastly, all sources should be arranged alphabetically.

Help with MLA formatting is very much needed especially if you are not sure of some important inclusions.