Many research assignments ask you to support a thesis with well-organized evidence. To do so, you need to conduct research, being careful to evaluate sources and manage the information you gather. You also need to choose a documentation style.

Most English instructors and some humanities instructors will ask you to document your sources with the Modern Language Association (MLA) system of citations.

When writing an MLA paper that is based on sources, you face several challenges:

When you do your library research, you want to be sure to capture all the information you need to document each source.