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MLA Citation Examples

Titles

Titles are given in the entry as they appear in the source. All principal words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) should be capitalized, do not capitalize articles, prepositions, or conjunctions when they fall in the middle of a title. Titles will be either italicized or in quotation marks.

Titles should be in italics is the source is self-contained and independent, for example: books, plays, films, journals, and websites.

Titles should be in quotation marks if the source is a part of a larger work, for example: journal articles, short stories, poems, essays, and webpages.

NOTE: If a work has no title, a description of the work should be used. The first word will be capitalized and the rest of the description will be capitalized as it would be in the text of a paper.

Mackintosh, Charles Rennie. Chair of stained oak. 1897-1900, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

You may also use text from the work itself as a title, for example, if an untitled poem is known by its first line or digital messages like tweets.

Dickinson, Emily. "Because I could not stop for Death –." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47652/because-i-could-not-stop-for-death-479.