My Various Random Ramblings

I found a nice Linux terminal command guide online, and have assembled it into a PDF for download.

LyX is a word processor that takes care of the formatting for you, leaving you to only create the content. This post will tell you how to have LyX automatically format a MLA paper for you.

To start with, there are a few things you will need:

1. LyX for Windows
2. MLA Template
3. JabRef
4. MLA-good Bibliography Style

At each of these pages, download the newest stable installer. After downloading, put the MLA Template and JabRef somewhere easy to access, and install LyX.

Basic Paper

After installing LyX and letting it install any packages prompted to, open it up. If it asks about installing packages, let it go ahead and check the check box for it to not remind you any more. Then in LyX, go to the File menu and select New From Template… In the window that opens, navigate to the MLA.lyx file you downloaded and open it. You will then see the main window for writing your paper. The first line has what is called meta info, which it what tells LyX how to format and title your paper. Go ahead and switch out my info with yours, including your first name, last name, teacher, course name, if you want to specify a date other than today, switch the /today out, and finally your title. Leave the page break and below alone, even if you are not using any references. You are now ready to write a basic MLA paper with no references. When you are done writing, go to the file menu and select Expot -> PDF (pdflatex) to save the document as a PDF to your My Documents folder.

Citations

Ready to do citations? Coming soon…