MS Word Bibliography Page

First, the rules

• The material below is only about page formatting. I suggest you go to Noodletools or some other reliable resource to get the details of capitalization, punctuation, and so forth. The “References” drop-down menu has a lot of other suggestions, but I have not tried them out.
• The official Microsoft template (that paper on exotic birds, written by Rama Gokhale) is wrong, but if you are using it you can follow the instructions below.
• The good news is that MLA and APA work exactly the same way as far as page layout goes.
• That bibliography page (MLA calls it “Works Cited.” APA calls it “References.”) always starts a fresh sheet after the main content of your paper. It is always the same typeface, type size, and line spacing as the body of your paper.
• The individual items are always alphabetized by the first item in the entry (usually the last name of the author).
• The paragraph format for the individual items is hanging indent, which means that the first line goes all the way to the left margin, and the rest of the body is indented ½ inch.

How to do it

1. Just after the last word of the main body of your paper, insert a page break. Place your cursor where you want the new page to start and press Ctrl + Enter (Windows) or Cmd + Return (Mac). (You can also go to the Insert menu and look in the upper left for Page Break.)
   • Many students like to force the new page by simply hitting Enter/Return a lot of times until they get a new page. That is very unreliable and assumes that you will never ever edit the piece and that nobody will ever open it with a computer that treats typeface and spacing differently from yours. Very poor idea.
2. If you are typing an MLA paper, type the words Works Cited and press Enter/Return. If you are typing an APA paper, type References and press Enter/Return. Do not worry about centering yet. We will get to that later.
3. Now each entry for a resource gets a separate paragraph. (Because you are using a computer, you can enter them in any order and alphabetize later.)
   • If you are using Noodletools, you can use copy/paste to insert the item. When you are in MS Word and press Ctrl + v (Windows) or Cmd + v (Mac), you will get a tiny additional menu. Drop it down and choose Merge Formatting. This will preserve the original italics.
   • Noodletools fakes a hanging indent by adding five extra spaces at the beginning of the second line. Just delete those and substitute a single space.
4. Now highlight the entire page, including the title (“Works Cited” or “References”). Go to the Layout menu and click the three-dot … menu item at the extreme right.
5. Choose Paragraph Options. In the new menu, choose these Indentation settings:
   • Before text: 0”
   • After text: 0”
   • Special: Hanging
   • By: 0.5”
   • Then click the blue OK box.
6. Now we finally deal with that title. Highlight the words Works Cited (or References) and press Ctrl + e (Windows) or Cmd + e (Mac).