Free MLA 9th Edition Formatter & Citation Generator

Unlike other academic styles, a standard MLA paper does not use a standalone cover page. Instead, your first page must feature a strict, double-spaced, four-line header in the upper left corner: your full name, your instructor's name, the course name, and the date. Furthermore, the date must be formatted in the specific Day-Month-Year style (e.g., 31 March 2026). Our document builder automatically places this block in the exact typographical coordinates required, while simultaneously injecting your last name and page number into the top-right header of every page.

The core of the MLA 9th Edition is the concept of 'Containers', which means that a smaller source is contained within a larger whole. For example, a journal article (the source) is published inside a journal (the container), or a television episode is streamed on a network. MLA requires the smaller source to be in quotation marks and the larger container to be italicized. Our Smart Citation engine connects directly to the Crossref API to automatically parse these containers, perfectly styling your references without you having to memorize the 9 core elements of MLA.

While the sciences use author-date formatting, MLA relies on the 'Author-Page' system. This means your parenthetical citations only require the author's last name and the specific page number from which the quotation is taken (e.g., Hemingway 45). There are no commas, no publication years, and no 'p.' before the number. Our editor makes it simple to drop these clean, minimalist citations right into your prose.

In MLA, your bibliography must always be titled 'Works Cited'. It must be centered at the top of a new page in plain text, with no bolding or underlining. The entire page must be double-spaced with no extra spaces between entries, and it requires a strict 0.5-inch hanging indent for any citation that runs longer than one line. Our rendering engine automatically alphabetizes your sources and locks these spatial rules into your final .docx file.