Gather bibliographic references for each source you intend to use in your work. For books, you will need to know the name of the author, the title of the book, the date, the publisher and the place of publication. For journal articles, you will need to know the author, the date, the journal title, volume and issue number, as well as the page range on which the article appears.
Consult the MLA style guide as you write. MLA style uses in-text citations, meaning that a reference, consisting of the author's name and a page number, is inserted in the text after the statement which draws on the cited source. If you have multiple sources from the same author, use an abbreviated version of the title in the reference. MLA style also esablishes rules for quotations and excerpts from cited works.
List the sources you've cited in a section at the end of your work. This is called the "works cited" section and contains a list of sources, organized alphabetically by the last name of the author. Each type of source has its own format. For example, the citation for a book is:
Last name, First name. Title of Book. Place of Publication: Publisher, Year of Publication. Medium of Publication.
The title of the book should be italicized. Each other type of source has its own reference format, detailed in the MLA style manual.