Mechanics of Prose

Names of Persons in Your Prose

    In general, most persons' names should be stated in full when they first appear in your prose and surnames along given thereafter. Common sense sometimes dictates exceptions to this rule. Very famous persons, such as Cervantes and Shakespeare, may be referred to by their surnames only. When you state someone's name fully, write the name as it appears in your source or in a reference work, including any suffixes, accent marks, and initials. 

Example

• Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Do not change the name Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to Henry Louis Gates, for example or drop hyphens or omit accents in a name. In subsequent uses, you may refer to a person by the surname only--Gates (unless, of course, you refer to two or more persons with the same surname). 

Suffixes with Personal Names

When you cite a person's name in full in the main text of your written work, use a suffix that is an essential part of the name--like those that indicate generation such as Jr. in English or a roman numeral. Do not place a comma before numbered suffixes. Place a comma before suffixes like Jr. and Sr.

Example

• Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

    In your prose, add a comma after suffixes like Jr. and Sr. if words follow; the suffix is parenthetical.

Example

• On 20 January 2021, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., became the forty-sixth president of the United States.

    To indicate possession with a name ending in a suffix, reword to avoid forming a possessive.

Example (incorrect)

• Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, legacy endures.

• Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s legacy endures.

Example (correct)

• Martin Luther King, Jr., has an enduring legacy.

Given Names and Personal Initials

    Capitalize given names of persons and the initials that stand for them. A period and a space follow each initial unless the name is entirely reduced to initials. 

Example

• Octavia E. Butler

• JFK

• George R. R. Martin

• V. S. Naipaul

• J. R. R. Tolkien 

    When a given name is hyphenated, retain the hyphen when using initials alone.

Example

• Jean-Paul Sartre

• J.-P. Sartre 

Names of Fictional Characters

    Refer to fictional characters in your text in the same way that the work of fiction does. You need not always use their full names, and you may retain titles as appropriate. 

• Example

• Dr. Jekyll

• Harry Potter (or Harry)

• Madame Defarge

Names of Organizations and Groups 

    Capitalize the names of all types of groups and organizations--companies, institutions, learned societies, and so on--according to the rules for styling titles of English-language works. Do not capitalize initial articles with names of groups and organizations.

Example

• To conduct the study, the Pew Research Center enlisted a team of statisticians.

• Our teacher gave a speech before the Fondo de Cultura Economica.

• Bulmer spent twelve hours a day at the Bibliotheque Nationale. 

• The institution houses the largest archive of the Grateful Dead's live performances.

• Will you attend the Conference Internationale Emile Zola et la Naturalisme a travers le Monde?

• A conference sponsored by the Zentralverband der Deutschen Geographen will take place in the fall. 

Retain internal capitals in the names of organizations and corporations.

Example

YouTube

Abbreviating the name of an organization is acceptable in some contexts, in particular if you repeat the name frequently in your prose. Always spell out the name in full and identify how you are going to abbreviate it at the first mention. Avoid abbreviating the name of an organization if you use the name only a few times. 

Example

The University of North Texas (UNT) is a research university recognized for its scholarship in many fields. The division of research at UNT collaborates with the office of the provost on innovative research projects and grants. 

Names of Literary Periods and Cultural Movements

Capitalize the name of a literary period, cultural movement, or school of thought only when it could be confused with a generic term. By convention, the words school and movement in such names are not capitalized. Also capitalize any proper nouns in such names.

Example

• Frankfurt school

• Harlem Renaissance

• modernism

• New Criticism

• Romanticism

Titles of Works in Your Prose

Whenever you use the title of a source in your writing, take the title from an authoritative location in the work--for example, from the title page of a book and not from the cover. Copy the title without reproducing any unusual typography, such as capitalization or lowercasing of all letters. Standardize capitalization of the title and add a colon between the title and the subtitle.

Example

Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture

Capitalizing Titles in English

When you copy an English-language title or subtitle or write the title of your own research project, use title-style capitalization: capitalize the first word, the last word, and all principle words, including those that follow hyphens in compound terms. Therefore, capitalize the following parts of speech:

• nouns (The Flowers of Europe)

• pronouns (Save Our Children; Some Like it Hot)

• verbs (America Watches Television; What is Literature?)

• adjectives (The Ugly Duckling)

• adverbs (Only Slightly Corrupt; Go Down, Moses)

• subordinating conjunctions (e.g., after, although, as, as if, as soon as, because, before, if, that, unless, until, when, where, while, as in Life As I Find It)

Do not capitalize the following parts of speech when they fall in the middle of a title:

• prepositions (e.g., against, as, between, in, of, to, according to; as in The Artist as Critic)

• coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet; as in Romeo and Juliet)

• the to infinitives (How to Play Chess)

• articles (a, an, the; as in Under the Bamboo Tree)

But capitalize an article at the start of a subtitle.

Example

"Building Libraries in Exile: The English Convents and Their Book Collections in the Seventeenth Century"

Do not capitalize the word following a hyphenated prefix if the dictionary shows the prefix and the word combined without a hyphen.

Example

Theodore Dwight Weld and the America Anti-slavery Society

When an untitled poem is known by its first line or when a short untitled message can be identified by its full text, the line or full text is used in place of the title, transcribed exactly as it appears in the source.

Example

Gertrude Stein's poem "The house was just twinkling in the moon light" is a love letter to Alice B. Toklas.

The tweet "Avoiding plagiarism: it's easy with the MLA's free online guidelines," by MLA style (@mlastyle), garnered considerable attention. 

Styling Titles

Most titles should be italicized or enclosed in quotation marks. In general, italicized the titles of long-form works, which are often but not always self-contained and independent of other works (e.g., novels, movies), and titles of works that contain other works (e.g., anthologies, television and streaming series). Use quotation marks for titles of short-form works (e.g., poems, short stories, songs) and works contained in other works (e.g., an essay in an edited collection, an episode of a television or streaming series). 

Italicized Titles (see the document below)

Italicized titles of works contained in a larger work

When a work that is normally italicized (such as a novel, play, or serialized graphic narrative) appears in a larger work (Ten Plays, Internet Shakespeare Editions, and Eightball in the examples below), both titles appear in italics.

Example

• Euripides's play The Trojan Women appears in the collection Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche.

• Did you use the edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet found on the Internet Shakespeare Editions website?

• The graphic narrative David Boring was serialized in three issues of Daniel Clowes's comic book Eightball.

Titles in Quotation Marks (see the document below)

Titles with no Formatting 

With some exceptions, titles in the following categories are capitalized like titles but are not italicized or enclosed in quotation marks (see the document below). 

Titles within Titles

When a titles appears within a title, the internal title should be clearly distinguished from the surrounding title. How you mark that distinction depends on the way the surrounding title is styled in accordance with guidelines earlier: in quotation marks, in italics, or, at the beginning of your paper, unstyled (see the document below). 

Numbers

In discussions where few numbers appear, spell out those numbers that can be written in a word or two.

Example

• one

• two-thirds

• one hundred

• thirty-six

• two thousand

• ninety-nine

• three million

• twenty-one

Use numerals when more than two words are needed. Numbers not spelled out are most commonly represented by arabic numerals (1, 2, 3).

Example

• 2 1/2

• 101

• 137

• 1, 275

Number-heavy contexts

In discussions where numbers appear frequently, such as reports of experimental data, use numerals for all numbers that precede units of measurement and to express ratios.

• 30 inches

• 5 kilograms

In such contexts, express related numbers in the same style. Thus, use numerals for numbers usually spelled out if they appear alongside numbers that must be expressed as numerals.

• only 5 of 250 delegates 

• exactly 3 ships and 129 trucks

Street addresses

Use ordinal numbers for numbered streets and do not format the suffix (e.g., -nd, -rd, -th, -st) in superscript.

• 4401 13th Avenue

Decimal fractions

Use numerals to express fractions presented as decimals.

• 8.3

Percentages and amounts of money

In discussions involving infrequent use of numbers, spell out a percentage or an amount of money if you can do so in three words or fewer.

Example

• one percent

• forty-five percent

• one hundred percent

• thirty-five dollars

• two thousand dollars

• ten million dollars

• sixty-eight cents

Use numerals with symbols when more than three words would be required.

Example

• $5.35

• $970

• 48.5%

In discussions involving frequent use of numbers, use numerals with symbols (e.g., $, %). Do not combine spelled forms of numbers with symbols. 

Items in a numbered series

In general, use numerals for items in numbered series.

Example

• chapter 9

• room 601

• page 143

• phase 3

Large numbers

Large numbers may be expressed in a combination of numerals and words.

• 4.5 million inhabitants

Plural forms

To form the plural of a spelled-out number, treat the word like an ordinary noun.

Example

• threes

• sixes

• forties

Add an s to numerals to form the plural.

Example

• 1990s 

• 747s

At the start of a sentence

Spell out a number that appears at the beginning of a sentence. It is often better to reward the sentence so that the number does not appear at the beginning.

Example (incorrect)

1960 was the beginning of a transformative decade in the United States.

Example (acceptable)

Nineteen sixty was the beginning of a transformative decade in the United States.

Example (preferred)

A transformative decade began in 1960 in the United States.

Spell out a number that appears at the beginning of a sentence even when it is paired with a related numeral that is not spelled out. However, it is often better to reword the sentence so that the number does not appear at the beginning. 

Example (incorrect)

250 out of 638 delegates favored the rule change.

Example (acceptable)

Two hundred and fifty out of 638 delegates favored the rule change.

Example (preferred)

The rule change was favored by 250 out of 638 delegates.

In titles

In English-language titles, spell out numbers that would be spelled out in text, but follow the source for numbers in foreign language titles.

• Moby Dick and the Whaling Industry of the Nineteenth Century

• Pairs, capitale due XIXe siecle

Retain a numeral that precedes an abbreviation in a title.

• The Ekopolitan Project: Migrant Histories and Family Genealogies from 19th and 20the c. Lagos

Commas in Numbers

Commas are usually placed between the third and fourth digits from the right, between the sixth and seventh, and so on, without a space. 

• 1,000

• 20,000

• 7,654,321

Commas are not used in page and line numbers, in street addresses, or in four-digit years. 

Dates and Times

In the body of your writing, do not abbreviate dates. Be consistent in your use of either the day-month-year style or the month-day-year style and use numerals to express numbers.

• 5 January 2020

• January 5, 2020

In works-cited-list entries, use only the day-month-year style. When using the month-day-year style in prose, a comma must be placed after the year unless another punctuation mark follows it.

• On December 10, 1920, Clarice Lispector was born.

• Clarice Lispector was born on December 10, 1920.

Do not use a comma between month and year or between season and year. 

• National Poetry Month was started in April 1996 by the Poetry Foundation.

• The seminar on modernist poetry was last offered in spring 2019.

Decades can be written out our expressed in numerals. Use one style consistently in your prose. 

• the eighties

• the 1980s

Spell out centuries in lowercase letters.

• the twentieth century

Eras are abbreviated in prose and elsewhere: for example, as AD (anno Domini, or "in the year of the Lord") and BC ("before Christ"), BCE ("before the common era"), and CE ("common era"), and AH (anno Hegirae, or "in the year of Hegira"). The abbreviations BC, BCE, and CE follow the year, but AD and AH precede it. 

•  19 BC

• AD 565

• AH 950

Numerals are used for most times of the day. Generally use the twelve-hour-clock system in prose. 

• 2:00 p.m.

When the time zone needs to be specified, use an abbreviation or spell it out.

• 4:30 EST

• 9:45 Pacific Standard Time

Exceptions include time expressed in quarter and half hours and in hours followed by o'clock. 

• five o'clock

• half past ten

• a quarter to twelve

Number Ranges

In a range of numerals, give the second number in full for numbers up to ninety-nine.

• 2-3

• 10-12

• 21-48

• 89-99

For larger numbers, give only the last two digits of the second numeral, unless more are necessary for clarity.

• 96-101

• 103-4

• 395-401

• 923-1,003

• 1,003-05

• 1,608-774

For roman numerals, ranges should be given in full.

• ii-iii

• x-xii

• xxi-xlviii

For alphanumeric numbers, ranges should be given in full.

• A110-A112

In a range of years beginning 1000 CE or later, omit the first two digits of the second year if they are the same as the first two digits of the first year. Otherwise, write both years in full.

• 2000-3

• 1898-1901

• 1945-89

In a range of years beginning from 1 through 999 CE, follow the rules for number ranges in general. Do not abbreviate ranges of years that begin before 1 CE.

• 748-742 BCE

• 143 BCE-149 CE

• 800-14

Add a space after the hyphen when you are indicating ongoing, incomplete ranges.

• In an interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN, Robert Caro indicated that he was working on the fifth and likely final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982- ).