MLA (Modern Language Association) is the standard citation style for literature, languages, cultural studies, and the humanities. If you're writing an annotated bibliography for an English, comparative literature, or philosophy class, MLA is almost certainly what your professor wants.
This guide covers MLA 9th edition — the current standard as of 2021. For a general overview of annotated bibliographies, see our main guide. For other styles, check our APA guide or Chicago guide.
MLA Annotated Bibliography Format at a Glance
Page setup:
- Title: "Annotated Bibliography" centered at the top (no bold, no underline — MLA doesn't bold titles)
- Font: 12-point Times New Roman
- Margins: 1 inch on all sides
- Spacing: Double-spaced throughout
- Hanging indent: 0.5 inch for the citation
- Annotation: Starts on a new line, indented 0.5 inch (continuation of the hanging indent)
- Header: Your last name and page number in the upper right corner
What each entry looks like:
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage
Books, 1993.
Morrison examines how the presence of African Americans has shaped the literary
imagination of white American writers. Through close readings of Poe, Melville, and
Hemingway, she argues that an "Africanist presence" has been essential to how
American writers define whiteness and freedom...
MLA Citation Format Rules
MLA 9th edition uses a "container" system. Every source fits into the same basic template, with nine core elements. Not every source will have all nine — you include what's available.
The Nine Core Elements
- Author. (Last name, First name.)
- Title of source. (Italicized for books/films; in quotes for articles/chapters.)
- Title of container. (The larger work it's part of — journal, website, anthology.)
- Contributors. (Editors, translators, etc.)
- Version. (Edition, version.)
- Number. (Volume and issue.)
- Publisher.
- Publication date.
- Location. (Page numbers, DOI, URL.)
Journal Article
Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 4, 2005, pp. 811–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/444516.
Key rules:
- Article title: in quotation marks, title case
- Journal title: italicized, title case
- Include volume and issue as "vol. X, no. Y"
- Use pp. for page ranges
- Include database name and DOI/URL if accessed online
Book
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Key rules:
- Book title: italicized, title case
- Include publisher and year
- No city of publication needed in MLA 9th edition
Chapter in an Edited Book
hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992, pp. 21–39.
Website
Purdue Online Writing Lab. "MLA Formatting and Style Guide." Purdue OWL, Purdue U, 15 Mar. 2024, owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style.
Key rules:
- Website name is the container (italicized)
- Include the date of publication or last update if available
- URLs: no "https://" — just the domain and path
Complete MLA Annotated Bibliography Examples
Example 1: American Literature Paper
Topic: Representations of race in the American literary canon
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage Books, 1993.
Morrison examines how the presence of African Americans has shaped the literary imagination of white American writers. Through close readings of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway, she argues that an "Africanist presence" — her term for the constructed image of Blackness — has been essential to how American writers define whiteness, freedom, and individualism. Originating as a series of Harvard lectures, the book maintains a conversational tone while making sophisticated literary arguments. Morrison's framework is foundational to my paper's analysis of racial coding in Hemingway's short fiction, providing the theoretical vocabulary for discussing how whiteness constructs itself through its relationship to Blackness in literary texts.
Toni Morrison. "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature." Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 28, no. 1, 1989, pp. 1–34.
In this essay, Morrison argues that the American literary canon has systematically excluded Black writers and erased the influence of Black culture on white literary production. She examines how the canon was constructed, who was included and excluded, and what ideological work the canon performs. The essay also provides a reading of the opening of her own novel Beloved, demonstrating how she crafts language to resist the very erasure she describes. This source complements Playing in the Dark by providing Morrison's perspective as both a critic and a practitioner, and her analysis of canon formation supports my argument that reading race in canonical texts requires understanding what the canon was designed to hide.
Spillers, Hortense J. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book." Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 64–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
Spillers distinguishes between "body" and "flesh" to theorize how the Middle Passage and slavery produced a uniquely American grammar of race and gender. She argues that enslaved Africans were reduced from "body" (a socially legible subject) to "flesh" (an object stripped of gender, kinship, and legal personhood), and that this distinction continues to shape American racial consciousness. The essay is dense and theoretically challenging, drawing on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and history simultaneously. While the difficulty of the prose can be a barrier, the conceptual framework is essential for understanding how American literature encodes racial violence at the level of language itself — which is central to my close reading of Faulkner's treatment of Black characters.
Example 2: Media Studies Assignment
Topic: The role of algorithms in shaping political discourse online
Pariser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Penguin Press, 2011.
Pariser introduces the concept of "filter bubbles" — personalized information environments created by algorithms that show users content they're likely to engage with while hiding opposing viewpoints. The book draws on interviews with engineers at Google and Facebook, as well as research in political science and psychology, to argue that algorithmic personalization threatens democratic discourse by limiting exposure to diverse perspectives. While the book is well-researched and accessible, it was written before the rise of TikTok and the current AI-driven recommendation systems, which operate differently from the search and social algorithms Pariser examined. Despite this, the core concept remains relevant and provides the foundational vocabulary for discussing algorithmic curation in my paper.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018.
Noble demonstrates how search engine algorithms — particularly Google — perpetuate racial and gender stereotypes by presenting biased results for searches related to women of color. Her central example, a search for "Black girls" that returned predominantly pornographic results, illustrates how supposedly neutral algorithms embed and amplify existing social biases. The book draws on critical race theory, feminist media studies, and information science. Noble's argument that algorithms are not neutral tools but products of the social contexts in which they're built is directly relevant to my paper, though her focus on search engines rather than social media recommendation algorithms means I'll need to extend her framework to cover platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
Common MLA Formatting Mistakes
Using title case in article titles in APA style. Wait — you're in MLA. MLA does use title case for everything. The confusion happens when students mix up APA rules (sentence case for article titles) with MLA rules. In MLA, both article titles and book titles use title case.
Including "https://" in URLs. MLA 9th edition omits the protocol. Write "www.example.com/page" not "https://www.example.com/page."
Forgetting the container. In MLA, most sources live inside a larger "container" — an article lives inside a journal, a chapter lives inside a book, a web page lives inside a website. Forgetting the container is one of the most common errors.
Using "p." and "pp." incorrectly. MLA does use "p." for a single page and "pp." for a range. But in in-text citations, just use the number without "p.": (Morrison 42).
Alphabetizing by first name. MLA entries are alphabetized by the author's last name. It sounds obvious, but it's a surprisingly common mistake, especially with authors who go by single names or when the author is an organization.
Finding Sources for Your MLA Annotated Bibliography
Looking for scholarly sources on literature, cultural studies, or the humanities? Sourcely searches across 200+ million academic papers and can generate properly formatted MLA 9th edition citations for you. Paste your essay topic or thesis statement and find relevant sources in seconds.
More Annotated Bibliography Guides
- What Is an Annotated Bibliography? — Types, structure, and when to use each
- Annotated Bibliography Examples — Complete examples across styles and disciplines
- Annotated Bibliography in APA — APA 7th edition formatting guide
- Annotated Bibliography in Chicago — Chicago style formatting guide
- How to Write an Annotated Bibliography — Step-by-step writing process
