Departmental Style Requirements

The English Department at College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University acknowledges the authority of the official style sheet of the Modern Language Association.  The following guidelines are not meant to be exhaustive; they are meant to remedy difficulties we have encountered frequently in student papers. 

For a more complete treatment of such matters as footnoting, citation, and other details of research paper writing, consult The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.  Most handbooks for college writing have a section on the MLA guidelines. 

There are also online sources providing some of the MLA guidelines.  One such source is the St. Cloud State University's Literary Education Online site.  Also, our libraries offer a page of special information for Citing Electronic Sources, with links to MLA examples.

The following topics, however, are the ones we deem most worthy of your further study:

1. The title of your paper:
1. Create a title for your paper that is interesting and useful
2. Do not under any circumstances underline your title or put it in quotation marks.
3. If you refer to a work in a title, that work may be underlined or in quotation marks (see #2 below), but your title should never be the same as a work.
4. Don't capitalize all the letters in your title.
   
2. Other Titles:
1. Titles of articles and short works are in quotation marks.
2. Titles of films, books and full length works such as plays are always underlined or in italics.
3. The title of your paper itself should be neither; see #1 above.
   
3. Spacing Between Lines:
1. Use double rather than single spacing between lines - even with set off quotations, which are indented 10 spaces.
2. Also double space footnotes and works cited.
3. Double space between paragraphs, but no more than that.
   
4. Spacing within Lines:
1. Be sure to have two spaces, and only two spaces, beteween sentences.
2. Be sure to have one space, and only one space, after commas, colons, semicolons.
   
5. Justification:
1. Justify (line up) the left margin of your paper.
2. Never justify the right margin.
   
6. Block Quotations:
1. When a quotation is set off in its own block (four or more lines of prose), use no quotation marks to enclose it.  Instead, indent the quotation ten spaces on the lefty throughout.
2. Maintain the same double spacing between lines moving in between text and block, and within the block itself.
3. Close by using a period and two spaces before parentheses enclosing the
   reference and its page or pages.
   
7. In-Text quotations:
1. When a quotation is not separated from the text in its own block, the reference enclosed in parentheses is preceded by the closing quotation marks and a space, and followed by a period.
2. There is no period before a closing quotation mark.
3. If the quotation ends in a question mark or exclamation mark, the questin mark or exclamation mark precedes the closing quotation marks nad a period follows the parentheses.
4. If more than one line of poetry is quoted, indicate the break between lines by a slash with a space on each side of it.  If the first of every line is capitilized in the original, maintain it in your quoted version.
   
8. Ellipses Periods:
1. Avoid unnecessary ellipses (. . .) before and after quoted material.
   
9. Quotation Marks:
1. As a rule, use double quotation marks.
2. Single quotation marks are used only when there is a quotation (or special term of some sort) within a quotation.
3. Punctuation with quotation marks:
1. Periods and commas go within quotation marks.  A quotation directly followed by a parenthetical reference is a special case (see 6b & 7 above).
2. Colons and semicolons go outside quotation marks.
3. Question marks and exclamation marks go either place, depending on whether the question or exclamation belongs to the whole sentence or just to the words within the quotation marks.
10. Hypehns and Dashes:
1. Hyphens have no spaces on either side of them.
2. A dash is made up of two hyphens: --.  Your software program may offer you an authentic dash and you may use that if you wish.
3. Like hyphens dashes have no spaces on either side of them.