Top Guide On How To Format Your Research Paper In MLA Style- Guidelines 2021

If you are entering university or graduate college, you may start thinking about Write My Paper or a thesis paper. Where most of the students have some sort of writing skills that have been polished throughout their academic journey by writing essays and other assignments since high school. Very few students know how to correctly format a paper or an essay according to any style like MLA.

They probably did not learn formatting in their high schools because it did not matter much. However, in graduate colleges, you have to follow specific guidelines of certain styles to format your paper. If your paper is not according to a certain style, marks are deducted.

Therefore, it is necessary that every college student must know the most common formatting styles and their guidelines. The most widely used styles are MLA, APA, Chicago, and Harvard. However, for the sake of this article, we will only discuss the MLA style.

General guidelines

• Set the paper size to 8.5 x 11.5 inch

• Set the margin to one inch on all four sides throughout the whole document
• Make sure that Times New Roman is used throughout the document and font size of 12 pt.
• Only a single space is left after the punctuation marks like period etc.
• A simple half-inch indent is put at the beginning of the first line of every new paragraph. You are supposed to use the “tab button” for indent and not to push the space button five times.
• Make sure that the whole text should be double spaced
• Italics are only used to show emphasis or write the titles of longer works
• There is no compulsory title/cover page

Formatting the first page

• As mentioned previously, there is no compulsory cover page. However, if asked by your professor, you can add a cover page.
• A usual cover page has the name of the student, written in the top left corner, which is followed by the supervisor’s name and course number and date in the following lines. This all information is double spaced like the rest of the paper.
• The title of the paper is written below the date and is centrally aligned. The title has the same font specifications as the rest of the body.

  Running head and page numbers

  In MLA format, the running head only contains the last name of the Essay Writer and is followed by the page number. These are on the right side of the header.

   

Section Headings

According to MLA format, you can use section headings throughout your paper to increase the readability of the research paper through a Paper Writing Service. In MLA, headings are not numbered. The level 1 and level 2 headings are flush left and heading 1 is bold while the second is not bold but is in italics. The level 3 and level 4 headings are both centrally aligned. However, level 3 is bold, while level 4 is in italics. Level 5 is flush left and is also underlined.

Referencing and citations

According to MLA format, an in-text parenthetical citation is used to cite a source. In the end, all the sources cited throughout the paper are enlisted on the work cited page. Note that in MLA, the bibliography or reference page is titled as a work cited page. While there would be another separate blog on MLA citation style, for now, here are few things that you should know about the work cited page 

• It is the last page at the end of the research paper, essay, or dissertation.
• The page also contains running head and page numbers like other pages.
• All the sources are enlisted in alphabetical order.
• The work cited page is also double spaced like the rest of the paper.