Why Do Different Teachers Want Different MLA In-Text Citation Formats? A Former Teacher Explains
It was 10:17 on a Tuesday night, and my 10th grader Liam was slamming his laptop shut hard enough to shake the crumbs off his half-eaten blueberry pop-tart. “This is stupid,” he said, kicking the leg of the kitchen counter. “Every teacher wants MLA in-text citations done a different way. Why can’t they just pick one?”
He pulled up two separate assignment rubrics side by side on his screen to prove it. For his first semester English block with Ms. Henderson, he’d lost three points on his last analytical essay because he put a comma between the author’s last name and the page number in his parentheticals. Ms. Henderson’s rubric clearly states: MLA 9: No comma between author and page, ending punctuation after the closing parenthesis. (Orwell 45) not (Orwell, 45). Got it.
Then he clicked over to his second English block with Mr. Torres, where he’s prepping for AP Lang next year. The prompt for this current research paper says explicitly: MLA in-text citations: (Author, page number), ending punctuation inside the closing parenthesis. If you don’t add the comma, I take points off.
I sat down next to him, and I had to bite my tongue not to laugh. I taught high school English for seven years before I switched to staying home with my kids, and I know exactly why this happens. It’s not that teachers are all out to confuse kids or penalize them for no reason. It’s just that MLA rules aren’t as set in stone as most people think, and teachers are human beings with their own context that shapes what they ask for.
When I first started teaching, our whole department used the 7th edition of MLA, because that’s what our classroom textbooks were printed with. When the 8th edition came out a few years later, we didn’t get any paid training to walk through the changes, and the district didn’t buy new textbooks for another five years. I kept grading the old way, because that’s what I had always done, and it didn’t feel worth the headache to re-teach everything when the whole point of citations was just to show where you got your information anyway. I’m sure a dozen of my former students have sat at their kitchen tables complaining about my weird citation rules too.
There are three other common reasons you see this discrepancy, too. Some teachers tweak the rules to match what they learned when they were in college, and never update. If your kid has a teacher who went to grad school in the 90s, they’re probably using the MLA rules they memorized for their own thesis, not the 2021 9th edition update. Other teachers, especially outside of English class, don’t care that much about formatting as long as you cite your sources. A biology teacher or a history teacher might ask for MLA, but simplify the rules because they care more about the content of your research paper than where you put the period. And yeah, some teachers just have small pet peeves. If a teacher has graded 1000 papers and finds extra commas distracting, they might just ask for no commas, even if the official rules say something different this year.
When Liam stopped complaining enough to listen, I walked him through what to do next, instead of letting him spiral. It’s not a big, complicated fix, and it’s way simpler than redoing every citation guessing what’s right. First, pull up the assignment prompt and syllabus again. Nine times out of 10, the teacher wrote exactly what they want, just like Ms. Henderson and Mr. Torres did. We checked Mr. Torres’s prompt again, and yep, there it was, clear as day. Second, if it’s not written anywhere, send a one-sentence email. No long excuses, no complaining about the other teacher, just a quick check-in. We wrote: “Hi Mr. Torres, this is Liam Miller. I just wanted to confirm you prefer MLA in-text citations with a comma between author and page number, and ending punctuation inside the parenthesis. I learned a slightly different format in my other English class this semester and wanted to make sure I got it right for this assignment. Thanks!”
He sent it, and got a reply back 10 minutes later saying that was exactly right, thanks for checking. He adjusted his 14 citations in less than five minutes, turned the paper in before his 11pm deadline, and got a B+ back a week later with no points off for formatting.
The thing I try to remind other parents of when they ask me about this is that this isn’t just pointless high school busywork. It’s actually a good, low-stakes practice for a real skill your kid will need for the rest of their life. No matter what job they end up in, different bosses want different things. One client wants reports in Google Docs with one-inch margins, another wants a PDF with 1.5 spacing. Learning to stop, check what the person asking for the work wants, and adjust accordingly, is way more useful than memorizing one fixed set of MLA rules that will probably change again in 10 years anyway.
I don’t tell Liam that all this stress doesn’t matter, because it does matter to him when points are taken off his grade. But I do tell him to stop assuming he knows the rule just because he learned it once for one class. He still forgets sometimes. Last week, he turned in a history research paper and didn’t check the syllabus, and his teacher doesn’t care at all about where the period goes, as long as the source is listed in the works cited. He spent 20 minutes adjusting all his punctuation for no reason, but still got an A. He’s still learning, and that’s okay. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one we’ve got, and learning to work with it is half the battle.
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