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MLA 9th Edition Style Guide: Footnotes and Endnotes

This guide will assist you in formatting in-text citations and a Works Cited list in the current MLA style.

Footnotes and Endnotes - Guidelines

Footnotes are placed at the bottom of each pertinent page. The endnotes are placed at the end of your paper, just before the Works Cited list. Don’t mix footnotes and endnotes in the same document. You must choose one or the other and be consistent throughout your paper. All the sources cited in your footnotes or endnotes must also be included in your Works Cited list.

Cite a long list of sources Elaborate or expand upon a statement in your main text Provide extra examples
Explain unusual documentation practice Explain word choice Identify or comment on allusions
Editions and translations used Justify scope of your topic or argument Indicate area for future research
Identify authors in et al in your citations Acknowledgements  

Formatting Footnotes and Endnotes

Footnotes (examples)

In your main text:

Often the heroine and her eventual husband are kept apart initially by misunderstanding, by the hero’s misguided attraction to another, by financial obstacles, or by family objections.1

At the bottom of the page:

1. See Green, especially 1-7, and also Hinnant, for further description and discussion of the courtship novel. Green considers Mansfield Park a courtship novel, including it in a list of such novels in the period 1740-1820 (163–64).

Citing a footnote within another source

Books, journal articles and other sources may contain footnotes or endnotes that you would like to cite in your paper. To cite information from a single numbered note, write “n” after the page number, and then write the note number, e.g. (Johnson 93n2). This would be a citation from the second note on page 93 of a source authored by Johnson.

Endnotes Page

MLA recommends that all endnotes be listed on a separate page entitled Notes (centered). The title of the page is Note if there is only one note. If there are two or more notes then the title of the page is Notes and it should appear before the Works Cited page.

The endnotes are double-spaced and listed consecutively by numbers that correspond to the note in your main text. The first line of each endnote is indented five spaces, and subsequent lines are flush with the left margin. After each endnote number you should place a period, a space, and then the appropriate note.

Endnotes page (examples)

Notes

1. As the authors argue literacy can be complete when reading is accompanied by writing..

2. For the purposes of this paper, “science” is defined as it was in nineteenth

century agriculture: conducting experiments and engaging in research.

3. Please note that any direct quotes from the nineteenth century texts are written

in their original form, which may contain grammar mistakes according to twenty-first

century grammar rules.

            4. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.