MLA Style, developed by the Modern Language Association (hence the name), is one of many rulebooks utilized in university research centers and academic associations to help writers in academia present their ideas in a clear and effective manner.

 

Whether you are a professor publishing an article in a specialized journal or a student writing a class paper, we are all expected to abide by sets of rules that will make our work look neat, communicate efficiently, and show its academic lineage. The latter, especially, is meant to be a guarantee of rigor and intellectual honesty, as well as a desire to inform, educate, and enable, rather than just persuade.

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MLA, Chicago, Harvard, APA, all share the same fundamental structure, and differ in emphasis, detail, and implementation. All these styles provide citation and formatting guidelines.

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Citation rules are about giving proper credit for the opinions and discoveries of others that we use in our own work.

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Formatting rules are meant to ensure a common style and to convey meaning through form. The role of style is far from superficial. From looks alone one may recognize the academic provenance of a book or article, identify the discipline it belongs to (history, literary criticism, sociology), pick out quotes and sources, immediately see if a mentioned source is a book (title will be in italics) or an article (title will be in “quotation marks”), and so on and so forth.

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Unlike other publications, scholarly papers and books are not flashy; they will not try to dazzle the reader using colors, catchy graphics, or inviting pictures. The focus is kept on the concepts and ideas, without distractions. In other words, reading academic work is very much like watching a film without a music soundtrack; it can be unsettling at first, and it takes some getting used to, but there are no gimmicks to manipulate our emotions and keep us watching/reading if the argument is not convincing. Everything rides on words, with style of form and style of writing working together to favor understanding.