The Handbook provides thorough instructions on citing, as well as guidelines for submitting work that adheres to the Modern Language Association’s rules and standards. The Modern Language Association released the 9th and most current edition of their MLA Handbook in April 2021. Today, MLA is not only used in literature and language subject areas many others have adopted it as well.

This uniform, or consistent, method to developing a paper or assignment allows for easy reading. It was developed as a means for researchers, students, and scholars in the literature and language fields to uniformly format their papers and assignments.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) is an organization responsible for developing MLA format.