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APA and MLA disagree almost entirely about your first page, and barely at all about the rest of the paper. Both want one-inch margins, double spacing throughout, and a hanging indent on the source list at the back. What changes is how the paper introduces itself, how the headings behave, and what goes inside the brackets when you cite something.
That is genuinely good news if your professor switches style on you mid-semester. The body of a term paper rarely needs rebuilding. The title block, the headings, and every parenthetical citation do.
- APA uses a separate title page; MLA puts a four-line heading block on page one and no title page at all.
- APA cites author and year — (Okonkwo, 2023). MLA cites author and page — (Okonkwo 47). No comma, no "p."
- The back page is called References in APA and Works Cited in MLA.
- Margins, double spacing, and the half-inch hanging indent are identical in both.
- Student APA papers no longer need a running head — that changed in the 7th edition.
- Switching style is roughly a 30-minute job if you work through it in the right order (see the checklist below).
The side-by-side table
Most guides explain one style at a time, which is fine until you are holding a rubric that says MLA and a draft that is already in APA. Here is every formatting decision that actually differs, in one place.
| Element | APA 7th edition | MLA 9th edition |
|---|---|---|
| Title page | Separate page. Title bold, title case, centered, three or four lines down. Then your name, school, course number and name, instructor, and due date. | None. Four lines flush left on page one: your name, instructor, course, date. |
| Date format | Due date, written normally (12 September 2026) | Day month year, no commas (12 September 2026) |
| Paper title | Bold, centered, on the title page and repeated at the top of page two | Centered, plain text, directly under the heading block. Never bold or underlined. |
| Page header | Page number only, flush right | Your last name, then the page number, flush right, half an inch from the top |
| Running head | Not required in student papers | Not used |
| Font | Several allowed: 12 pt Times New Roman, 11 pt Calibri, 11 pt Arial, 11 pt Georgia, 10 pt Lucida Sans Unicode | Any legible font where italics clearly differ from regular type, 11–13 pt. 12 pt Times New Roman is the default choice. |
| Margins | 1 inch, all four sides | 1 inch, all four sides |
| Line spacing | Double, including block quotes and the reference list | Double, including the Works Cited page |
| Headings | Five levels. Level 1 centered and bold, Level 2 flush left and bold, Level 3 flush left, bold and italic. Levels 4 and 5 are indented like a paragraph. | No prescribed system. Short papers usually run without headings; if you use them, keep one visual pattern and stay consistent. |
| In-text citation | (Author, year) or (Author, year, p. 47) | (Author page) — (Okonkwo 47) |
| Source list title | References, centered and bold, on a new page | Works Cited, centered, plain text, on a new page |
| Source list indent | Half-inch hanging indent | Half-inch hanging indent |
Your instructor's handout beats every rule in this table. Departments routinely add their own requirements — a cover sheet on an MLA paper, a word count in the header, a specific font. If the syllabus contradicts the manual, follow the syllabus and say so in a note if you are unsure.
Page one: the difference students lose points on
This is where the two styles look least alike, and where a grader spots the wrong format in about two seconds.
APA wants a title page of its own. The title sits three or four lines down from the top margin, centered and bold, in title case. Underneath it, on separate double-spaced lines, go your name, your school, the course number and name, your instructor, and the assignment due date. The page number goes in the header, flush right, and the title page counts as page 1.
One change catches out anyone taught the 6th edition: student papers no longer carry a running head. If you are copying an old template with "RUNNING HEAD:" in the corner, delete it.
MLA has no title page. You start straight in on page one with four flush-left lines: your name, your instructor's name, the course, and the date in day-month-year order. Your title comes next, centered, in ordinary type. Then the essay begins. The header carries your last name and the page number, half an inch from the top edge.
MLA page one, top-left block:
Amara Okonkwo
Dr. Halvorsen
ENGL 214
12 September 2026
Then, centered on the next line: Reading Silence in Toni Morrison's Beloved. No bold, no quotation marks around your own title, no extra space.
Headings: prescribed in APA, improvised in MLA
A term paper long enough to need sections is where the two styles part ways again.
APA gives you five defined heading levels, and you use them in order without skipping. Level 1 is centered and bold. Level 2 is flush left and bold. Level 3 is flush left, bold and italic. Levels 4 and 5 are indented like the start of a paragraph, run into the text, and end with a period.
Most undergraduate term papers never go past Level 2. If you find yourself reaching for Level 4, the section is probably trying to do too much and would read better split.
MLA prescribes nothing. The handbook expects most student papers to run continuously without headings, and that is still normal for a literature essay. For a fifteen-page term paper, headings help the reader — just pick one treatment, apply it identically throughout, and do not mix bold with italic with underline.
Citations: year versus page
This is the change that touches every paragraph, and it is the one people underestimate when they switch.
APA is author–date. The reader is being told how current the evidence is, because in the social sciences a 1994 finding and a 2024 finding carry different weight. So: (Okonkwo, 2023), and (Okonkwo, 2023, p. 47) when you quote directly.
MLA is author–page. The reader is being pointed at a specific spot in a text they may want to look at themselves, which is what literary analysis needs. So: (Okonkwo 47). No comma. No "p." Just the surname and the number.
If the author's name already appears in your sentence, you do not repeat it in the brackets. "Okonkwo argues that the silence is structural (47)" is correct MLA. "Okonkwo (2023) argues that the silence is structural" is correct APA.
Switching styles means your quotations often need rewriting, not just re-bracketing. An APA sentence built around a year ("In 2023, Okonkwo showed…") reads oddly in MLA, where the year carries no signal. Read your quote-heavy paragraphs aloud after a switch.
Block quotes: counted differently in each style
Term papers lean on long quotations more than essays do, and this is a rule people get wrong in both directions.
APA counts words. A quotation of 40 words or more becomes a block quote. MLA counts lines. Prose running more than four lines becomes a block quote, and verse more than three.
That difference matters more than it sounds. A 35-word quotation stays inline in APA but may well spill past four lines on the page in MLA, which makes it a block quote there. The same sentence, formatted two different ways, depending on the course.
The mechanics are otherwise the same in both. Start the quotation on a new line, indent the whole block half an inch from the left margin only, keep it double-spaced, and drop the quotation marks — the indent is already doing that job. The citation goes after the closing punctuation, not before it.
Leaving the quotation marks in place around a block quote. If it is indented, the points are redundant and a grader will notice. The only exception is a quotation that already contained quotation marks inside it.
The back page: References or Works Cited
Both styles put every source on a new page at the end, double-spaced, alphabetical by author surname, with a half-inch hanging indent. The name and the entry shape differ.
APA calls it References, centered and bold. Entries lead with the author, then the year in brackets, then the title in sentence case.
MLA calls it Works Cited, centered and in plain type. Entries lead with the author, then the title in title case and italics or quotation marks, then the container — the larger work the source sits inside, such as the journal, the anthology, or the website. The container system is the part of MLA that most confuses first-timers, and it is worth reading properly rather than guessing.
If you want the full citation mechanics rather than the paper layout, our guide to APA 7th and MLA 9th compared goes through entry construction style by style.
The switch checklist: changing style mid-draft
Do these in order. Working back-to-front on the citations first is what keeps you from breaking sentences you have already fixed.
Delete the APA title page and add the MLA heading block, or the reverse. This is the single most visible marker, so get it right before anything else.
APA is a bare page number, flush right. MLA is your surname then the number. Two clicks in the header, easy to forget entirely.
Swap year for page, or page for year. Search your draft for "20" to catch every year inside brackets — faster than reading through hunting for them.
Anything that leaned on the year for meaning needs rephrasing once the year disappears, and the reverse.
References becomes Works Cited, or the reverse. Then reorder each entry — the elements are the same, the sequence and punctuation are not.
APA's levels are strict; MLA has none. Do this after the citations so you are not reformatting text you later rewrite.
APA lists a short set of approved fonts. MLA asks only for legibility and a clear italic. A Calibri paper is fine in APA and unusual in MLA.
Half an hour, unhurried, on a fifteen-page paper. The mistake is doing it at 3am the night before, when step 4 gets skipped and the paper reads like it was translated.
Which one will your term paper be in?
You do not choose. The course does, and the pattern is fairly reliable across US institutions.
- APA — psychology, education, nursing, business, sociology, and most social sciences.
- MLA — English, literature, philosophy, languages, and much of the humanities.
- Chicago — history and some fine arts, and a common third option your syllabus may name instead.
If the syllabus is silent, ask. It takes one email and saves a rewrite. For essay-length work rather than a full term paper, the layout rules are slightly lighter, and our guide on how to format a college essay covers that version.
If the deadline math has stopped working — a term paper due the same week as two exams — our term paper writing help pairs you with a subject-matched writer who formats to your required style from the start, from $7.89 a page. It sits inside our wider paper writing service, which covers research papers, literature reviews, case studies and lab reports on the same terms.
