This past week has seemed somehow longer than any other week in the UCA Writing Center. A project we thought might take a couple of days ended up taking more than a couple of weeks. And that project, as the title of this entry suggests, was overhauling the MLA Style Guide.
At this point, I'm ready to write a dissertation on the varying rhetoric of the APA, MLA, and CMS documentation styles because I've certainly become an expert on all three. But the changes made to the latest edition (the 7th) of the MLA Handbook shocked me when I took the time to read it. Most shocking of all was this passage concerning in-text documentation:
"If your source uses explicit paragraph numbers rather than page numbers--as for examples some electronic publications do--give the relevant number or numbers preceded by the abbreviation par. or pars. ...If the author's name begins such a citation, place a coma after the name. [I'm letting the typo in that last sentence stand because it pretty well expresses the state I'm in after weeks of figuring out MLA.]
***
"When a source has no page numbers or any other kind of reference numbers, no number can be given in the parenthetical reference. The work must be cited in its entirety though you may indicate in your text an approximate location of the cited passage (e.g., 'in the final third of his article, Jones argues for a revisionist interpretation'). Do not count unnumbered paragraphs" (221). Emphasis mine.
Of course, for many of us who require research writing in our classes, this is not great news. I can certainly understand the motivation behind it: For online and digital research, finding a quotation or paraphrase is as easy as hitting Ctrl+F, but for many students who are already confused about documenting sources, it opens up a larger can of worms. A paraphrase that is unintentionally too close to the original text will be easy to spot and could open students up to accusations of plagiarism. A well-written paraphrase, on the other hand, will be harder to search for, which may mean that readers won't have the same level of access to the research as the writer.
Then there are the changes to the works cited list. MLA has done away with clunky URLs in favor of simply including the type of media, print, for example. Everyone was hoping that the contributors would once a for all settle the confusion regarding online and digital sources. Unfortunately, that did not happen. In fact, I'd venture to say they actually managed to make the handling of these sources even more confusing. The handbook "helpfully" states, "MLA style is flexible, and sometimes you must improvise to record features not anticipated by this handbook. In some cases, citation formats devised to handle complex print publications may serve as a basis for improvisation" (182-3). There are no models for including blogs, podcasts, forum posts, videos watched on YouTube, etc. in the new edition. Some may say that these models aren't necessary because blogs, for example, cannot possibly be considered credible. In my opinion, nothing could be farther from the truth. There are blogs on every subject. The one I included in the UCA Writing Center's MLA style guide (as a suggestion only) is a blog about linguistics written by a gentleman with a Ph.D. in the subject. There are a lot of educational and credible materials on the Internet that shouldn't be discounted.
But that isn't all. Except for online only scholarly journals, MLA considers all Web sites non-periodical. So if you're looking for the model for an online newspaper, you'll find it in section 5.6, "Citing Web Publications," and more specifically in 5.6.2 "A Nonperiodical Publication" where you'll find models for articles from the New York Times Online, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly lumped in with citations from the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, A Bibliography of Literary Theory, and even Google Maps.
So after going over the changes and practicing a bit with the new tip sheet in our professional development meeting, my brain was done with documentation styles...until next week when I will begin editing the APA style guide.
Just remember, if you need help understanding MLA, you can make an appointment at www.uca.edu/writingcenter. We're prepared to help you save your own brain from exploding.
Image courtesy of Nevery Lorakeet, http://www.flickr.com/photos/neverylorakeet/4055975423/
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