Once upon a time, a word processor was little more than a blank canvas for your finger-transmitted musings: You’d open up the program, type whatever you wanted — and, well, that was pretty much it.

Google Docs has all the features you need to write a paper in MLA format, as well as a template to set one up automatically.

You can make folders in Google Docs to help organize your documents, and you can do so from inside a document, or within your ...