Pseudodoxia Epidemica
That is to say, “vulgar errors” — some of the most common mistakes in MLA formatting students make in presenting their essays. I take my title from one of my favorite books.
1. Misplaced quotation marks. Quotation marks don’t go outside a parenthetical statement:
Auden writes, “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart (Selected 74).”
You’re not quoting your own citation — that wouldn't make sense. Correct form:
Auden writes, “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart” (Selected 74).
2. Misplaced punctuation of other kinds. Note where the period goes in that sentence, at the very end, after the parentheses. But of course, if there are no parentheses at the end, the period is to be tucked neatly inside the closing quotation mark: “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.” (Yes, they do it differently in Great Britain. We’re not in Great Britain.) The general American rule is that short punctuation marks go inside quotation marks and tall ones go outside them.
3. Failure to respect the poetic line. See that little slash in my quotation from Auden? That's called a virgule. It marks a line break in poetry, which is important because good poets choose their line breaks carefully — they are indeed part of a poem's meaning. Note the space before and after the virgule; note that, if the beginning of a line is capitalized in the poem, it must be capitalized in your quote as well. Use the virgule to cite two or three lines of poetry, but anything longer should be set apart as a block quote. Everything about the visual presentation of a poem is chosen by the poet: line breaks, capitalizations, indentations, and so on. You are not at liberty to ignore any of it.
4. Extraneous punctuation and abbreviation. Note that the parenthetical citation to Auden's Selected Poems uses no comma, no "page" or "pg." or even "p." Nothing. Just the short title — the first significant word of the title — and the page number. Nothing else at all.
5. Puffed-up bibliographies. MLA formatting allows you to indicate your "Works Cited," and that's it. You cite a work if you quote it directly, if you draw an idea from it, or if you acquire a specific piece of information from it. If a work hasn't provided you with any of those things, then there's nothing to cite. So accept that fact of life, and don't try to make your research look more impressive by inventing something called "Works Consulted" or even "Bibliography." You have one option and it's called "Works Cited."
6. Confusion About Titles. The titles of short stories, essays, articles, and short poems — basically, anything shorter than book length — go in quotation marks, while the titles of books and magazines go in italics or are underlined. You never combine quotation marks and italics, and you never use bold type for anything. Yes, there are borderline cases that call for discernment — is it Heart of Darkness or "Heart of Darkness"? — but not many. (And notice how the question mark went outside the quotation marks in that last sentence? That's because the question was mine, not the title's.)
7. Citing the wrong people. Some students have a strange fascination with the editors of books in which poems or stories appear. Any work that has an author should be cited by that author's name, never, ever, by anything else. Edward Mendelson edited Auden's Selected Poems, and did so admirably, but when you quote the lines "You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart" you are not quoting Edward Mendelson.
8. Weird formatting of block quotes. Students are often especially creative with block quotes — that is, quotations long enough to be set apart from the main body of the text. They will fail to indent them, or will put them in italics, or will put quotation marks around them, or will center them them on the page. Some ambitious folks have even employed all of those typographical eccentricities at the same time. But all of them are wrong.