[student last name] Towle 1 Freesia Towle [students name] Kevin Riordan [instructors name] 25 October 2010 [due

date of the assignment] WRIT 1301 [name of the course] MLA Formatting Guidelines [title of paper, centered] The first line of each of your paragraphs should be indented half an inch. All of your text, including your heading, should be double-spaced. Your first paragraph should include your thesis statement, which is often stated towards the end of the paragraph. You should also briefly discuss each of the primary texts you are analyzing, identifying the authors and the titles. Here are examples of how to note the titles of various texts: Title of a Short Story, Essay, or Article [just between quotation marks] or Title of a Full-length Book, Television Show, or Film [just italicized]. Please make sure that your text is in Times New Roman 12-point font (including page numbers) and that all of your work is double-spaced (including between the heading and title, as well as between the title and body of your essay). Your margins should be 1 inch all around. Please include page numbers on the upper right hand corner with your last name preceding the page number. You may need to make adjustments under the Paragraph tab on your Word document to ensure that all of your text is double-spaced, that you dont have any additional spacing either before or after lines, and that you check the box next to Dont add space between paragraphs of the same style. When citing a short quotation, here is the format you should use for your papers: Everyone wanted to know what he had planned, but no one was willing to come right out and ask him (Burgess 48). With the exception of the first and last paragraph of your essay, try and

[student last name] Towle 2 include an average of one citation from your text for every paragraph, and discuss how it supports or otherwise relates to your thesis. Make sure that you incorporate the citation into a grammatically correct sentence. Block quotes are any citations that are longer than three full lines of typed text. Only use these longer quotes if everything in the quote is vital to your discussion; there is an art to selecting short quotes and narrating the surrounding information (this is your job, not the authors). This is how to format block quotes (one-inch indent on the right, no indent on the left, and no quotation marks), demonstrated with another quote from Matt Burgess: Now all Alfredo needed to do was find himself a dog. On Tuesday, he took the R train to the Animal Care and Control center in Rego Park, only to find out that . . . they dont even offer any animals up for adoption. They just take them in. Well great. On to Plan B. If he couldnt adopt a pit bull, hed steal one. (54) Notice that for this citation, we only included the page number because the author of the source was clear. Also, with a block quote, the parenthetical goes outside of the period, while it typically goes inside (see above). Be careful not to begin or end any of your paragraphs with a quotation. Throughout your paper, remember that your arguments and ideas are central, and that the citations you include are there to support your ideas. For further clarification and for additional samples, please refer to the Purdue OWL site: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/. Well discuss the full Works Cited page later, but heres a basic example: Works Cited Burgess, Matt. Dog Fight: A Love Story. New York: Doubleday, 2010.