… English department front desk @ Building E3-360 Tel: 323-265-8632 Q: My instructor keeps talking about MLA format. What's that? A: The Modern Language Association (MLA) answers this question with the following statement: All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation … is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited …