1. Clarity and readability. With its standardized layout and citation style, MLA ensures that your essay is easy to read and understand. 2. Academic integrity. Properly citing sources demonstrates academic integrity by giving credit to the original authors and avoiding plagiarism. 3. Consistency. Contractions. Apostrophes are used to form contractions, that is, words that are shortened by omitting one or more letters. For example, you are for you are, madam for madam, I say to say and until. When the apostrophe is at the beginning of the word as in 'til, make sure the punctuation mark is inserted correctly. Like all other text in an MLA-style article, the title block is double-spaced. The title is in the same font as the rest of the document, it is neither bold nor enlarged. There is no extra space above or below the title. A truly informative headline will include the general topic and your specific opinion on that topic. So if you pan, revised. An in-text MLA citation provides the author's last name and a page number in parentheses. If a source has two authors, name both. If a source has more than two authors, name only the first author, followed by "et al." ". If the part you are quoting extends over several pages, include all pages. For example, you might write something like: In his article "A Mystery Explained" for the New York Times, the author laid out the details of the crime. 4. Foreign words. If you are writing in one language but want to introduce a word in another language, you might consider italicizing it. For example: “The Spanish word for war is. The following rules apply when citing information from a note in an MLA in-text citation: To cite information from a single numbered note, write "n" after the page number, then write the number of the note, for example n2. To cite information from multiple numbered notes, write "nn" and include a range, for example nn1-2