How to Handle Long URLs in an MLA Citation

When you are citing electronic sources in a research or term paper, you need to include the URL of the website that you used. However, some URLs are extremely long and cannot be retyped or pasted into your works cited page without serious difficulty. In the case of extremely long URLs, you have several options of how to deal with them when you use MLA style. You can choose how to handle them based first on the preference of your teacher or instructor and second on how you prefer to list them in your bibliography.

Things You'll Need

  • URL
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Instructions

    • 1

      Break the URL for a line break at slash marks whenever possible. For example, a URL that contains several lines of text should be broken up in this manner: http://images.google.com/imgresimgurl=http://awesomegems.com/gems/gs3639anim.gif&imgrefurl=http://awesomegems.com/gems/index.html&h=/images%3Fq%3Dsapphire%2Bcolors%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den. As you can see, the slashes are at the end of each line.

    • 2

      Refer to a site's search URL. This is the URL of the main page of the site. For example, while many of Amazon.com's pages have extremely long URL titles, you can simply use "http://www.amazon.com" to let people know the original source of the information. Some professors do not like this particular technique, as they feel it is not specific enough, so make sure that it is okay with your instructor before you employ this strategy.

    • 3

      Create a "path" to the page that you used. For example, if you want to refer to details on a legal page of www.lettuceleaves.com and you had to go through the help and privacy act pages to get to the specific page that you used as a resource, you might site the URL like this: <http://www.lettuceleaves.com> Path: Help; Privacy Act; Legal Terms and Conditions. "Help," "Privacy Act" and "Legal Terms and Conditions" are all the names of the pages that you navigated through on the way to your destination source material.

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