In fairness to the Modern Language Association and other makers of popular academic style guides, citing sources -- if always tedious -- was once relatively straightforward: journal articles like this ...

Let's say you need to cite a dictionary definition (we'll use "hendecasyllabe", just for argument's sake). Pretty straight forward: note the source somehow in context ...

I'm writing a paper on several poems by a single poet, all of which are contained in a single text. I know the MLA guidelines for parenthetical citation with page numbers, but how do I work line ...