Here I'm going to show you how to format an essay using Microsoft Word and formatting the paper in MLA format. The first thing I notice here that needs to be fixed is the title. This title is underlined and MLA format does not underline titles. So I'm going to select all of that title and I'm going to go up here and change that to where it's not underlined. So now the font looks the same as the font in the body, and that's exactly the way it should be in MLA format. The next thing I want to check for is that the body is double spaced, so the lines here should all be double spaced. And I can select all of the text and then I'm going to right click on this and go to paragraph. And I want to change the settings right here. First, you want to make sure your line spacing is set to double. This essay is already set with double space, so that's good. And then over here, we want to make sure both of these numbers are zero. This is the spacing before and after the paragraph, and we want these to be set at zero so that the double spacing is the same between paragraphs as well. So now I have everything set to the way that I should have it for MLA format. And then click OK. And you see now everything is evenly spaced. We got rid of that extra space between the paragraphs here, and there was extra space between the title before, and now we don't have that. So that's correct. The other thing that you want to check is the margins. Remember, these should be one inch margins on the side. Over here one inch margins. And you can just look up here at the ruler and we can see that that is about one inch. That's a one inch margin. So the margins are correct here. One other thing that I notice is the end of the lines here. In MLA format these lines should not all be even like this and I can see that the student set this using centered text. Do not use centered text. You should use the left align. So align text left right here. So I'm going to select everything again, and then I'm going to come up here and I'm going to choose the align text left. When I do that, everything moves to the left, and now the lines over here are not all even, and that is the way we want it. Now my title got moved, so I'm going to need to put that back in the center. Okay this is starting to look pretty good now. It's looking like an MLA formatted paper. The next thing I need to do is put in my heading and my page numbers. Now the heading just goes one inch from the top of the paper again. So that's going to be right here on this first line. So I need to scoot my title down. I'm going to hit return one time to move that down. And then on the top line, I want to go back and make it aligned on the left again, this is where I'm going to put my heading. In an MLA format, the first line of the heading is the student's name. I use Student Name as an example. Student would be the first name and Name here is the last name. So you put your first and last name. Notice it's still double spaced and that's what we want for the heading. After the student's name you put your teacher's name. On the next line you put the course name. And on the last line you put the date. I'm going to go ahead and type a date so you can see the format because the format is very particular. In MLA format, you have to put the day first, the number of the day, then you put the month, and you need to spell out the whole word, don't use an abbreviation, and then put the year. Okay, so now the other thing I need to do is the page numbers, and you can do the page numbers a couple of different ways. The way I like to do it is to come up to insert. Click insert and then go down to where it says page numbers. This little box opens up, and the page numbers in MLA format should be on the right, but at the top of the page, so you want to make sure it says top of the page, right. And that's going to be the corner here. And then to make the page number show up on the first page, we'll click this right here, and say OK. And then the page number shows up here and you can check, there's the two, and there's the three. So when you do it like this, all the page numbers get put in the correct place. You see it's one inch from the right, and it's half an inch from the top, which is the correct place. So we have our page numbers, and MLA format says that in front of the page number, should be the student's last name. So to do that I need to double click here to open that up. Now the cursor is over here on the left side because it's left aligned. To get my name over here, I need to click on the right align. So I click on that, and now my cursor is blinking here. And I can type my last name. So the student's last name goes right there. I can see that this is a different font from the body. So I'm going to want to fix that. This should be the same font as the font of the body of the essay. So I'm going to close this for just a minute, and come back and look and see what font was I using. If I highlight this, I can see the font right here. So this is Times New Roman and it's 12 point. Remember, that's what you should be using for an MLA formatted paper. So this is correct font, but this is not correct font. So I am going to come back up here, I'll double click again, and then I'm going to highlight this, I can highlight the name. And I can see up here it's Calibri, that's not the correct font. So I want to change that to Times New Roman. Now it says Times New Roman and I want to change it to 12 point. I can do the same thing to the page number. If I just double click on the page number, then it gets highlighted And you see it's also Calibri 11 point. So, I'm going to do the same thing and change the page number now, and then I'll change the size as well. So, now my page number is formatted the same as the rest of the text. And then I can close that and I'll look at my other pages, just to make sure. It has my name and my page number and it's half an inch from the top of the page and one inch from the right side. That's perfect, that's exactly how I wanted it formatted. So now this paper is formatted in MLA format. When you format yours correctly it will look very much like this.
