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MLA Style Manual, formerly titled MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing in its second (1998) and third edition (2008), was an academic style guide by the United States–based Modern Language Association of America (MLA) first published in 1985. MLA announced in April 2015 that the publication would be discontinued: the third ...
This list of style guide abbreviations provides the meanings of the abbreviations that are commonly used as short ways to refer to major style guides.They are used especially by editors communicating with other editors in manuscript queries, proof queries, marginalia, emails, message boards, and so on.
In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, [1] [2] speech marks, [3] quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name.
A shortening is an abbreviation formed by removing at least the last letter of a word (e.g. etc. and rhino), and sometimes also containing letters not present in the full form (e.g. bike). As a general rule, use a full point after a shortening that only exists in writing (e.g. etc.) but not for a shortening that is used in speech (e.g. rhino).
Quotations and titles of works (such as books, films, and music) should be given as they appear in sources. However, there are certain situations where this principle is not followed in order to maintain a level of typographic conformity across the encyclopedia: see § Typographic conformity .
Abbreviated forms should be retained as-is in direct quotations, and may be clarified if necessary with square-bracketed editorial insertions. In all cases, such abbreviations follow the italic or quotation-marked style of the full title.
Quotations embody the breezy, emotive style common in fiction and some journalism, which is generally not suited to encyclopedic writing. Long quotations crowd the actual article and distract attention from other information. Many direct quotations can be minimized in length by providing an appropriate context in the surrounding text.
The MLA publishes several academic journals, including Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, one of the most prestigious journals in literary studies, and Profession, which is now published online on MLA Commons and discusses professional issues faced by teachers of language and literature.