MLA Citations Have 87 Rules. Nobody Memorizes Them All.

The MLA Handbook is 350 pages long. It specifies exactly how to format citations for books, journals, websites, films, tweets, TikTok videos, and dozens of other source types. The rules are precise, inconsistent across source types, and change with each edition. The MLA 9 format MLA 9th edition (current) uses a universal template with nine "core elements": Author. Title of Source. Title of Container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date, location. Not every source uses every element. A book citation: Lip, Michael. Building Developer Tools. O'Reilly, 2025. A journal article: Smith, Jane. "Title of Article." Journal Name, vol. 12, no. 3, 2024, pp. 45-62. A website: "Page Title." Site Name, publisher, date, URL. The tricky parts Author name inversion. MLA inverts the first author's name (Last, First) but not subsequent authors: "Smith, Jane, and John Doe." Container nesting. An article in a journal on JSTOR has two containers: the journal (first container) and