MLA is the style used in English literature, linguistics and humanities coursework — the BA and MA English programmes at TU and its affiliated campuses set it most often.
MLA differs from APA in ways that matter: it cites by page rather than year, uses title case, and calls the list Works Cited rather than References. Enter your source details and this tool applies those conventions for you.
MLA 9 organises references around containers — the larger work holding the thing you cite. A poem sits in an anthology; an article sits in a journal; an episode sits in a series. Identify the container and the structure follows.
This is why MLA handles unusual sources more gracefully than styles with a fixed template per type. A source can have two containers — an article in a journal, accessed through a database — and each is described in turn.
MLA cites author and page: (Adhikari 45). There is no year in the in-text citation, which surprises students moving from APA and is the single most common formatting error in first MLA assignments.
For a quotation from a poem, cite line numbers rather than pages, writing "lines" on first use. For a play, cite act, scene and line. For a source with no pagination — a web page — give the author alone.
MLA uses title case: capitalise the first, last and all principal words. Short works — articles, poems, chapters, episodes — take quotation marks. Long works — books, journals, films, anthologies — are italicised.
Getting this pairing wrong is conspicuous in a literature essay, because the distinction between a poem and the collection containing it is precisely the sort of thing the discipline cares about.
The list is titled Works Cited and contains only sources you actually cited. Entries are alphabetical by the first author's surname, with a hanging indent, double-spaced.
MLA recommends an access date for online sources, since web pages change and disappear. Where you are citing a page on a Nepali institutional site — many of which reorganise without redirects — the access date is doing real work for a reader trying to find what you saw.
MLA is standard in English literature, linguistics and humanities coursework, including BA and MA English at TU and affiliated campuses.
MLA cites author and page — (Adhikari 45). The year appears in the Works Cited entry, not in the text.
The larger work holding your source: the journal containing an article, or the anthology containing a poem. A source can have more than one.
MLA uses Works Cited, and it includes only sources you actually cited.
Cite line numbers for poetry, writing "lines" on first use, and act, scene and line for a play — not page numbers.