Pardon my ignorance, but what is MLA format?
MLA is Modern Language Association. They basically define the proper format for things like research papers, essays, reference citations, etc... They have established a set of rules that define how non-fiction material should be formatted. For example: Indents should alsways be 5 spaces, all text should be double spaced, etc... It seems trivial but for ‘official’ documents its rather important. And if you really study it it’s actually very nit picky about almost everything you could ever type on paper.
Hope that helps!