MLA Guides

The second edition of this best-selling classroom guide helps students understand why digital literacy is a crucial skill for their education, future careers, and participation in democracy. Offering practical guidance for assessing information online, this guide provides students with the tools to locate reliable sources among the clickbait and viral videos that pervade the web. The guide's hands-on activities, germane readings, and lesson plans give students strategies for reading and analyzing data visualizations; finding and evaluating credible sources; learning how to spot fake news; fact-checking; crafting a research question; effectively conducting searches on Google and on library catalogs and databases; finding peer-reviewed publications; evaluating primary sources; and understanding disinformation and misinformation, filter bubbles, propaganda, and satire in a variety of sources—including websites, social media posts, infographics, videos, and more (on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube).

New to the second edition:
• attention to the ethical dimensions of digital technology, including privacy issues and bias in search algorithms—with an accompanying lesson plan
• an emphasis on how digital literacy can help stem racism, sexism, ableism, and the persistence of harmful stereotypes
• instruction on using inclusive research and citation practices to avoid perpetuating systemic bias
• a new chapter, “Composing in Digital Spaces,” that offers instruction in multimodal composition and foregrounds accessibility
• a new and up-to-date reading, “The Real History of Fake News”
• a section on avoiding plagiarism
• updated references and examples
• resource lists of digital tools, platforms, and software that can support the practices described in the guide

Later printings include an index, provided here for free download: Index (PDF)

What makes a good research topic in a literature class? What does your professor mean by “peer-reviewed” sources? What should you do if you can’t find enough material? This approachable guide walks students through the process of research in literary studies, providing them with tools for responding successfully to course assignments.

Written by two experienced librarians, the guide introduces the resources available through college and university libraries and explains how to access the ones a student needs. It focuses on research in literature, identifying relevant databases and research guides and explaining different types of sources and the role each plays in researching and writing about a literary text. But it also contains helpful information for any student researcher, describing strategies for searching the web to find the most useful material and offering guidance on organizing research and documenting sources with MLA style.

Extensively updated and revised, the second edition emphasizes digital resources that can be accessed remotely, offers critical thinking strategies for evaluating sources, and includes more information on writing about audiovisual as well as written works.