BUC-EE's Practice Test

In MLA style, short works are enclosed in quotation marks. This signals that the piece is a smaller work—like an article, a poem, a short story, or a song—embedded within a larger source. Longer, standalone works are set in italics, not quotation marks, which helps readers quickly tell apart the different scopes of titles. When you mention a short work in a sentence, you keep the title in quotation marks and place punctuation after the closing quote, as in: The poem "The Road Not Taken" is often anthologized. In the Works Cited list, the same rule applies: short works go in quotation marks, while the larger container (such as a book or journal) is italicized. Bold formatting isn’t used for titles in MLA, and underlining is considered outdated; italics are reserved for longer works.