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Michael Lip
Michael Lip

Posted on • Originally published at zovo.one

MLA Citations Have 87 Rules. Nobody Memorizes Them All.

#beginners #career #productivity #tutorial

The MLA Handbook is 350 pages long. It specifies exactly how to format citations for books, journals, websites, films, tweets, TikTok videos, and dozens of other source types. The rules are precise, inconsistent across source types, and change with each edition.

The MLA 9 format

MLA 9th edition (current) uses a universal template with nine "core elements":

Author. Title of Source. Title of Container,
  other contributors, version, number,
  publisher, publication date, location.
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Not every source uses every element. A book citation:

Lip, Michael. Building Developer Tools. O'Reilly, 2025.
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A journal article:

Smith, Jane. "Title of Article." Journal Name, vol. 12, no. 3,
  2024, pp. 45-62.
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A website:

"Page Title." Site Name, publisher, date, URL.
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The tricky parts

Author name inversion. MLA inverts the first author's name (Last, First) but not subsequent authors: "Smith, Jane, and John Doe."

Container nesting. An article in a journal on JSTOR has two containers: the journal (first container) and JSTOR (second container). Each container gets its own set of elements.

Date formats. MLA uses day-month-year: "15 Mar. 2024." Months longer than four letters are abbreviated. This is the opposite of US date convention and catches Americans constantly.

URLs. MLA 9 includes URLs but omits "http://" and "https://". Just "www.example.com/page" or the bare domain.

No page numbers for web sources. If a web source has no page numbers, you do not fabricate them. The location element is simply omitted.

In-text citations

MLA uses parenthetical author-page citations: (Smith 45). No comma between author and page. No "p." before the page number. If the author is mentioned in the sentence, only the page number goes in parentheses.

For generating correctly formatted MLA citations from source details, I built a generator at zovo.one/free-tools/mla-citation-generator. It handles books, articles, websites, and media sources with proper formatting for MLA 9th edition.

I'm Michael Lip. I build free developer tools at zovo.one. 500+ tools, all private, all free.

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