The next element of a citation that has formatting that remains mostly the same,
regardless of the format, is the title. This needs to be written
exactly as it's written in the source, but with the punctuation and capitalization standardized.
By title I mean, title of the book or ebook, the title of the article, or the title of the webpage.
I say mostly the same, but it really depends on the container portion.
Book titles, because they have their own container, are presented in italics.
Titles of works that are within larger containers, such as book chapters, articles,
pages on websites, all of those titles are actually presented in quotation marks.
I will get into this later, and explain it.
The part that stays the same is that you need to use the full title in your citation,
including any subtitles. You need to make sure that you capitalize all the major words,
including the first word of the title and the first word after the subtitle.
Even if they are words such as and, and the. You now come to the container information.
The container provides the information about the publisher, and where you can find that source.
Citations for books are formatted differently than articles, websites, videos,
newspaper articles, datasets, legal rulings, and lectures notes.
All of them have variations on how they are formatted.
So, if you follow the simple core elements formula,
you should be able to get enough information for people to be able to find your sources.
The order that the information for the container section is presented is:
title of container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date, and location.
There's one final step in creating an MLA citation that remains the same regardless of all the formats,
And that is, in your work cited list, all citations are presented in a hanging indent paragraph style.
I'll demonstrate how to do this at the end.
Now, you're not expected to memorize how to format for each type of resource
but, you should be familiar with the sources that you use the most.
You're going to run into times where you're not sure how to format a source.
When that happens, use your handy MLA style guide or any other citation tool to help.
It's important to keep in mind that not everything you read online is a website
There are a variety of types of sources that you can access through a computer.
We're going to review three types of sources and in a general way.
You are going to run across some variation, so I always suggest looking things up in an MLA Style manual,
if you have to tweak how to cite the source.
We are going to cover books and e-books, articles, and websites.
