(MLA, APA, etc.) What they are, why they’re used, how they change, why it matters.
My video lesson for this is available here.
As you’re progressing as a writer, at some point, you’ll learn about style guides. Maybe you already have; they’re generally introduced in high school. The two most common for academic writing are the MLA style guide, from the Modern Language Association, and the APA style guide, from the American Psychological Association. This is not the same as AP style, which is not so much a formatting guide as guidelines for journalistic writing, created by the Associated Press.
There’s also Chicago and Turabian Style, which are very similar, the Council of Science Editors Documentation Style, the American Medical Association Style, Bluebook 101, the Linguistics Society of America’s Unified Style Sheet, and several others – but MLA and APA formats are the most widely used.
Because I teach English, and like most of the humanities, literature and language courses use MLA style, this series is going to focus on some of the particulars of MLA. But before we get to that, I want to address a question that many (if not most) students have when they are introduced to the concept of standardized formatting for document setup and references:
Why do we have to do this?
This question is actually two concerns that are intermingled. The first is, “what is the purpose of having style guides? Why do they exist?”
Now, contrary to what may be popular opinion, it is not so that your instructors have one more thing that they can dock you points for messing up. And believe me when I say that I speak from personal experience on this. Did you know that in APA style, you give a heading to the conclusion, but NOT to the introduction? Mm? Well, I didn’t. Not until I got docked EIGHT PERCENTAGE POINTS for having the word ‘Introduction’ above my introduction.
The key is that there really are reasons for all of these fiddly little rules. They create consistency within the discipline, which is the answer you’ll find if you read various articles about style manuals. All of these rules help readers navigate a text that, even when (hopefully) well-written, may tackle challenging concepts and unfamiliar information. You don’t have to label an introduction in an academic paper for APA style, because it’s the first thing the reader encounters. However, APA style DOES require students to label the conclusion, because that sets it apart from the body of the essay.
This becomes especially important with research – both primary research, in which the author(s) have conducted some kind of experiment or study or survey and are reporting on the results, as well as secondary research, in which the author(s) are using information from previously-published articles to support the thesis they’re making in their own work. Let’s say you’ve been assigned to write an essay in support of school dress codes, and one of your supporting points is “dress codes help students focus on their studies.” The thing is, while that may seem painfully obvious to YOU, any responsible reader (such as, hopefully, your instructor) is going to look at that and think, “oh really? SAYS WHO?”
And if you haven’t cited your sources, it calls your evidence, and thus your thesis, and therefore your entire essay, into question. Because while (hopefully), you would never DREAM of sinking to the DEPTHS of SUCH INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY… there actually are people who have done that.
An article published in the academic journal Science claimed to have performed a study that examined the effects of gay and straight canvassers’ attempts to get voters to support same-sex marriage. The reported results were that while both groups had strong results at first, follow-up surveys with the voters showed that only the gay canvassers’ efforts had an effect that lasted, and more significantly, that those voters had also shifted the opinions of others in their households. The article made international headlines, possibly because it seemed to contradict a significant amount of prior research that had demonstrated that confronting people about strongly-held beliefs tends to cause a defensive reaction, leading to them tightening that hold on those beliefs, rather than to changing their mind on the issue.
Things started to unravel when a professor at Stanford and a graduate student at UC Berkeley started examining the article’s information, hoping to create a follow-up study that might help explain why the previous one had gotten such intriguing results. The deception that they uncovered, with the help of a professor at Yale, resulted in the lead author being so thoroughly discredited that he lost an assistant professorship that had been offered to him by Princeton, and he wound up CHANGING HIS NAME.
(Apparently John Proctor was wrong; you CAN have another name.)
I promise you, I am NOT kidding. It’s wild. Plagiarism and falsification of research are NOT crimes, as some of my students invariably think, but research is about exploring new ideas and learning and adding to the collective knowledge and understanding of humanity. And when you LIE about it, you are REDUCING and TAKING AWAY from that. You are choosing ignorance over discovery.
And in a community dedicated to learning, that’s about as bad as it gets.
So. To pull it back to the point of THIS blog post, using a standardized style makes it easier for readers to understand your information, where it came from, and how you got it. And all of that increases the credibility of that information, and therefore, of your work as well.
However, I am not teaching students to write for publication in scholarly journals. Many of them will go on to college, perhaps even graduate school. Some won’t. It’s understandable that the other part of the question “Why do we have to do this” is actually “Why do *I* have to do this?” If you’re not planning a career in academia, do you really need to learn the ins and outs of a system that isn’t really used outside of it? And even if you are, by the time you’ve finished high school and gotten through your first degree, there’s a chance that the system will have changed, as it does about every five years or so. In fact, the most recent edition has just come out… today, actually, as I’m writing this script, although by the time you see this, it’ll have been around for over a week. MLA 9 was released on May 30, 2021. Previous editions came out in 2016, 2009, 2003, and on back to the late 1970s.
Students pick up on the lack of direct application of learning to use a style guide, and they draw the conclusion that this is just useless information.
Apparently, growing up makes you unreasonable, and that’s the only reason that we’re making them learn things like algebra or frog dissection.
But while many of them won’t live lives in which they perform those exact tasks regularly, the underlying skills often apply in much broader contexts. Dissection requires attention to detail, patience, and small-motor coordination. Linear algebra reinforces logical thinking, but adds the challenge of using it in an abstract context. Students learn to be able to use their imagination in new ways, while staying within a provided framework. This builds problem-solving skills and prepares students to respond effectively to unfamiliar situations. As Adam Hrankowski points out, “mathematics is about playing with ideas.”
Working with style guides and following formatting protocols provides similar reinforcement of other useful skills. I see variations of this meme on my social media feeds pretty regularly.
So I reference that idea when I introduce MLA style to my students. I tell them that they don’t have to – and shouldn’t! – memorize the tax code in order to file their taxes. The way they file is almost certainly going to change throughout their lives, as they get different jobs, or marry, or have children, or move, or start a business. In addition, the tax code changes pretty often; even more so than MLA style does!
As a result, filing your taxes accurately is mostly about finding the information you need (your W2s, 1099s, etc.) in order to do so, and following a set of detailed directions. These directions are available, FOR FREE, at public libraries and other government buildings, as well as online. Just like when you have to use MLA format, in order to file your taxes correctly, you have to identify the appropriate context, follow the guidelines – making sure to incorporate the relevant information in the specified manner – and of course, CHECK YOUR WORK.
I don’t give my students tests on MLA format; I just have them use it in their assignments. Of course, I provide them with instruction. Together, we practice setting up documents, and creating Works Cited entries and in-text citations, before I have students work on it independently. I also make sure that they know about some of the resources they can use to help them. The online writing support from Purdue University, Purdue OWL, is one of the best-known, but there are many different supports available. I do stay away from sites like easybib, as students seem to find it difficult to resist the temptation to just drop a URL into the citation generator and accept whatever it spits out without bothering to check any of it. Kind of goes against the whole “learning to pay attention to details” … thing.
In the rest of the videos in this series, I’ll be talking about different aspects of formatting. But the most important concept that I’d like you to take away from this is that it’s not as much about knowing how wide the document margins should be as it is about finding information, following directions, and paying attention to details. Those are skills that will be helpful in many different areas of your life.
And also, they’ll help you get a better grade in English class.
Teaching Reflection 