Wordle of the Daydle

Challenge yourself to use all the words in a short story, poem, or dialog. Or use 10. Or focus on one word for inspiration.

Tuesday Tickler

Personify a plank of wood!

Tuesday Tickler

Emphasis on description: Describe the journey of a bird headed south for the winter.










Photo courtesy of Bruce Timothy Mans, http://www.flickr.com/photos/btm/296028/, licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs license.

Wordle of the Daydle

Challenge yourself to use all the words in a short story, poem, or dialog or focus on one of the words for inspiration!

Tuesday Tickler

Focus on detail and setting in a scary scene to draw out fear and suspense.











Photo courtesy Urban Sea Star, http://www.flickr.com/photos/28633851@N05/4728946272/, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs license.

Wordle of the Daydle

Challenge yourself to write a poem or story containing all the words or choose one for inspiration.

I Need a Nap: The Rhetoric of Documentation Styles

As you may surmise from my last post, we've been busy at work revising and upgrading our online style guides. Our graduate assistants Rebecca and Ashley did most of the work collecting sample publications and putting them into MLA, APA, and CMS format.

I've been doing the work of editing. For anyone out there who thinks an editor is a person who sits at a desk with a red pen tucked between her ear and skull occasionally pulling  it out to circle a comma splice or two, I've got news: the editor's job is not only misunderstood, it's also a lot of work. Specifically, the editor clarifies ideas in a document (without tampering with the intended meaning) while correcting errors, making final stylistic choices, and checking for accuracy. A large part of checking for accuracy is understanding where information comes from and what motivates the purveyor of the information. In other words, editing requires a complete understanding and an ability to finesse that "thing" called rhetoric.

And so I've spent the last month becoming the world's expert on APA and MLA (and soon to be CMS). I know: that's quite a title I've rewarded myself, but hear me out.

When the American Psychological Association gets together to update their "publication manual," they are not thinking one whit about what the Modern Language Association did when they updated their "handbook." And for many of our students, that's the rub. In high school, the default documentation style is MLA. Not many students will be using it in their disciplines, so a few high schools have adopted APA instead. It makes no difference: When the students come to college there is only one documentation style, the one they know, the one chosen by their language arts teacher. When they are asked to make a choice or even switch to another style, they have no idea why they should choose one over the other or why a prof would ask them to use the style of a particular discipline. The official style manuals don't explicitly describe their rhetorical stance: Why are titles of articles not capitalized in the reference lists of APA, for example? Why has MLA decided to omit URLs in favor of the word "Web"? The editors of both manuals have discussed those stylistic choices and have good reasons for them. But they never consulted the other groups of editors.

When a person, like me, sits down to distill a variety of style guides into more accessible tip sheets, she discovers a lot about what the organizations that produce them value. Here are bulleted lists of values I've inferred influenced the decisions of each organization.

APA seems to value...

• Both qualitative and quantitative research (for example, market research and ethnographic studies, respectively).
  
• Summarizing several studies to support the researcher's conclusion as well as finding specific quotes and paraphrases that support discrete ideas.
  
• New forms of presenting research, including podcasts, blogs, videos, and forum posts.
  
• Finding and using credible sources on the Web, including government technical reports, laws, statues, scholarly journal articles, and online magazines and newspapers.
• Using URLs that link directly to a document when that URL will likely remain static, but favors using the domain name when the website (all one word in APA) is searchable.
• Following the lead of newspapers by capitalizing headlines as most newspapers do (only in the reference page, not in the body of the paper).
• Writing as if the paper will be submitted to a journal in psychology or education, among the other disciplines that use it.

MLA seems to value...

• Primary research, including the explication of literary texts.
• Critical and theoretical secondary research as opposed to qualitative and quantitative research.
  
• Using quotations and paraphrases to support discrete ideas that then support an overall conclusion.
• Print and print-based sources over strictly digital sources; hence, there is no model for citing an eBook in a works cited list. The organization instead encourages flexibility in improvising digital sources from similar print sources.
• Visual appeal and legibility; therefore, the editors have done away with clunky URLs that make the works cited list difficult to read.
• Consistency in terms of capitalization and punctuation rules.
• Writing as a part of class requirements, although, certainly, the handbook was also meant for those intending to submit to the MLA's conferences and publications.
  

The reason for these differences is that psychologists and educators (the primary users of APA style) research very differently from those who study the meaning of language and literature. Unfortunately, our first-year students in particular don't understand what it means to be part of a discourse community and how these manuals help to establish the rhetoric of the particular community they were meant to guide. For them, documentation is busy work meant to prove they weren't plagiarizing. They don't understand that the day they declare their major, they are shifting into a community whose rhetoric they will need to navigate.

Of course, the tutors in the Writing Center have been trained to help students making this shift, and we look forward to the challenge!

Photo is courtesy BritneyBush, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tzofia/485531100/, licensed with an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs copyright through Creative Commons.