MLA Style Manual

The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008) is the third edition of The MLA Style Manual, first published by the Modern Language Association of America in 1985. It is an academic style guide widely used in the United States, Canada, and other countries, providing guidelines for writing and documentation of research in the humanities, especially in English studies; the study of other modern languages and literatures, including comparative literature; literary criticism; media studies; cultural studies; and related disciplines (but not disciplines like history, philosophy, and theology, which follow The Chicago Manual of Style).

According to the MLA book catalog description, since first being published in 1985, the MLA Style Manual has been "the standard guide for graduate students, scholars, and professional writers". MLA style "has been widely adopted by schools, academic departments, and instructors for over half a century"; the MLA's "guidelines are also used by over 1,100 scholarly and literary journals, newsletters, and magazines and by many university and commercial presses", and they are "followed throughout North America and in Brazil, China, India, Japan, Taiwan, and other countries around the world".

Style guide

A style guide (or manual of style) is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization, or field. (It is often called a style sheet, though that term has other meanings.)

A style guide establishes and enforces style to improve communication. To do that, it ensures consistency within a document and across multiple documents and enforces best practice in usage and in language composition, visual composition, orthography and typography. For academic and technical documents, a guide may also enforce the best practice in ethics (such as authorship, research ethics, and disclosure), pedagogy (such as exposition and clarity), and compliance (technical and regulatory).

Style guides are common for general and specialized use, for the general reading and writing audience, and for students and scholars of various academic disciplines, medicine, journalism, the law, government, business, and specific industries.

Citation

Broadly, a citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source (not always the original source). More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears. Generally the combination of both the in-body citation and the bibliographic entry constitutes what is commonly thought of as a citation (whereas bibliographic entries by themselves are not). References to single, machine-readable assertions in electronic scientific articles are known as nanopublications, a form of microattribution.

Citations have several important purposes: to uphold intellectual honesty (or avoiding plagiarism), to attribute prior or unoriginal work and ideas to the correct sources, to allow the reader to determine independently whether the referenced material supports the author's argument in the claimed way, and to help the reader gauge the strength and validity of the material the author has used. As one article has argued, citations relate to the way authors perceive the substance of their work, their position in the academic system, and the moral equivalency of their place, substance, and words.

MLA

MLA may refer to:

Organizations

Professions and titles

Style

Style is a manner of doing or presenting things.

Style may refer to:

In arts and entertainment

In literature, linguistics, and rhetoric

Literary works