http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
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“In the upper left-hand corner of the first page, list your name, your instructor’s name, the course, and the date. Again, be sure to use double-spaced text.”

Accordingly I have removed the “\usepackage{setspace}” line and the corresponding commands around the \begin{mla} section.

One nice side effect of this is that a recent short paper that formerly ended three lines into the fourth page now ends six or so lines away from the fifth page–a difference that is much larger than the extra space between these header lines provides. This suggests that the overall spacing of the MLA package is negatively affected by the inclusion of manual spacing rules.

Examining a before and after PDF provides evidence of this. The spacing when you have setspace and manual \singlespacing and \doublespacing commands appears to be far closer to 1.5 lines than 2. There is a definite difference in the line spacing between the two documents that is so pronounced it caused the same professor who brought up the header spacing to also encourage me to use a 12pt font (even though I was) because the text looked more diminutive due to the 1.5 spacing.

The mla-paper package itself provides a method for easily using single-spacing when necessary:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archiv.....mla-paper/
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“2. Some professors require block quotes to be singled space. To accomplish this with the MLA package, use the blocks and blockm environments for single paragraph and multiple paragraph cites, respectively.”

In light of the fact that the header should be double-spaced according to the MLA format. and the fact that setspace causes problems with spacing throughout the rest of the paper, I would recommend updating the tutorial accordingly. This page has been and will continue to be an invaluable resource for humanities students.

I am now in my final semester and I am so grateful to have discovered this tutorial years ago. It has allowed me to prosper as an English major while using the Vim text editor that I love so very much. Thank you!

Again, thanks! I’m a first year philosophy student and I’ve switched from AbiWord to LaTeX and I’m very impressed with the result!

John, thanks as well. I literally used the same code in this post in my example page, and I just re-did it all, and it works fine for me with having the packages listed in the order I’ve listed them. I’ve included a link to your comment in the body text above, though.

Thanks

The download links to CTAN would be a bit better if they were like http://mirror.ctan.org/info/lshort2e so that the downloader is sent to a mirror nearer to them. (Likewise with the mactex link.)

Jim

I’ve found that the easiest way to see how it all works is to have a sample document with dummy type that abides by all the rules. (I’ve done this for various journal papers, but not yet for an MLA-style document.) Do you have such a document available or do you know where I could find one?

This would save the time required to actually read and comprehend everything you’ve explained and allow one to get started without delay.

Thanks again.

Richard Benish