I am an English major, and am halfway through my Junior year. Lately its become embarassingly obvious that my ability to write a research paper in MLA format is painfully lacking. In fact, I pretty much suck at communicating ideas in general. This has been very discouraging. I like the classes I am taking, I like literature, but seeing my papers come back bleeding from infamous red correction marks is humiliating. Each vague squiggle is laughing at my incompetence. Additionally, I am taking classes in which teachers already expect students know MLA format. I know it, I have a little booklet that tells me how to format my papers and proper citation, but for some reason I always seem to screw it up. And in classes where they expect I know MLA, errors in format are costly. It would be one thing if the papers I was writing were halfassed last minute all-nighters, but these are papers that are very carefully written and researched. When I work hard at something and fail regardless, it makes me think that I just suck at it. I enjoy my major too much to change it, its just if I could write solid papers I’d have a lot more confidence in myself. I want to have at least a 3.0 GPA when I graduate, and this glaring weakness in paper writing is going to make it nigh-impossible to hoist a 2.74 up to that point anytime soon.
Does your school have a Writing Center? Both my undergraduate college and the university I’m at now for my masters’ has a Writing Center with tutors who will work with you free on citation, format, writing skills, copy editing, any of that. If you have a resource like that available to you, maybe it would be a big help. Some have programs where you work with one tutor throughout a semester if you feel you need intensive help.
I know shit-all about MLA format, but if formatting references are a problem, I strongly recommend you find yourself a copy of Endnote. Most references can be downloaded from your library database, and you just drag them to where you want them in the document. Select MLA format, the program does the work. Has no trouble with adding more references later, etc… Brilliant.
I’m afraid I not a stellar writer either.
mischievous
I would correct that last sentence, but it made the point so beautifully…
I second the advice to go to a writing/tutor center. I work as a tutor, and I have helped more people with their MLA formatting than I can even count. Are there any specific parts of MLA you aren’t getting? Do you have friends or fellow English majors proof your papers and help you with your mistakes? If not, that might help too.
Purdue’s Online Writing Lab and MLA/APA Format is a good resource too.
And hey, if all else fails my email is in my profile. I actually tutor because I enjoy it (we make a laughably small amount of money) and I’ll help if you want.
The MLA Guide is my best friend. I’m supposed to teach this stupid thing and I can never remember it. Buy it. Love it. Wear it out.
Hire yourself an editor on these research papers. You will not regret it.
Do all the things suggested here, and talk to your professors. If you aren’t putting off papers until the last minute, then you have earned the incredible luxury of taking a rough draft tohe professor two weeks in advance and asking if he/she will read it over and then go over it with you. Many (though not all) professors will jump at the chance toreally work with a student who obviously really wants to improve.
And keep pushing at it. You’ll learn. Keep track of your mistakes on a separate list to refer back to when you try it again.
Want to know humiliation? I’ve been a writer for years, and took up writing biographical essays for Oxford University Press. My first three essays came back with edits <i>on every line</i>. Spelling errors, grammar errors, subject-verb agreement, questionable facts. It was the prose equivilent of a bitch-slap.
You’ll get better, but only if you make it so. Good luck.
The Random House Handbook is a good one, too, as it contains many concrete suggestions as to selecting topics, doing research, making outlines, etc., as well as guidelines to MLA and APA format.
My absolute favorite is A Writer’s Reference (11th ed) by Diane Hacker. It’s fantastic.
Do you do a dozen rewrites of everything you turn in?
I teach MLA format. Can’t your prof or a tutor help? Or the writing center? A fellow student. There is help out there; please seek it. And good luck.
The error in question was putting the author of a newspaper column’s name before the title of of the column. This made my grade go from what should have been a B+ to a D+. I could swear its always been like that; maybe the teacher is just crazy and has some backwards interpretation of MLA citation because in the course reader that SHE WROTE it should be right; in fact I based the citation off how she wanted it in the reader. I am going to have a talk with her about this and maybe even complain to the head of the English department (I have his class as well this semester). What happened was I was confused and just assumed if she says I’m wrong then I’m wrong, and felt really discouraged considering how hard I worked on the paper.
Is this approach normal? Isn’t it like failing someone because they didn’t dot an i on page 3 out of 17?
I sympathize with you and agree that bringing drafts to your instructors and visiting the writing center are certainly in order. However, I’d also like to warn you of a student trap you seem to be caught in, and that’s the “I worked long and hard on this, and I only got a D” trap.
I can throw a basketball for a week, but if I’m not aiming at the hoop, it’s not going to go in. Doing the wrong thing for a long time doesn’t make it right. You’re being graded on the quality of your work, not on the time or effort you put into it.
It’s pointless to spend more time and effort on doing something wrong. Your goal here should be to find out the errors you’re making and seek to correct them. That’s where talking to your instructors and going to the writing center can help.
And yeah, if the instructor wants you to follow a certain style and grades heavily for it, that’s the way it is. Just like in “the real world”, when the boss wants you to do something a certain way - maybe that way doesn’t make sense to you or seems pointless, but that’s the way the boss wants it and you’d be wise to do it that way. Complaining about how unfair it is won’t change that.
When I graded papers I insisted that my students used MLA, and cut them some slack in the beginning as they got used to it but when it came to their final papers I did adjust grades depending on the accuracy of their citations. The best way to cover your ass is to hand in a draft well before the paper’s due and get feedback. However, I think the jump from what you thought to be a B+ paper to a D+ seems a little extreme. How do you estimate this grade reduction?
According to pepperlandgirl’s link, putting the author’s name (last name first, first name last) before the title of the article is MLA format.
Well, I try to teach MLA format. Perhaps you can help me; I’m not sure how to help my students because I don’t understand why they have problems. To me, it’s just a matter of looking up the correct type of citation and following the example in the book – but somehow, for some reason, most students struggle with this. (It’s particularly bad when Internet sources are involved, even though the book has a whole chapter on documenting electronic sources and we go over the standard format in class.)
If you could shed some light on what makes documentation hard for you, I would greatly appreciate it, and so would my future students. Thanks.
My advisor just sent me two chapters of my dissertation to copyedit and proofread–without giving content feedback, for the most part–because I mixed up MLA and Chicago format in the text and works cited. And I can tell you in all honestly this was due to laziness. I have the MLA Guide for Research Papers, have access to online sources for Internet citations (which are really tricky), and still managed to fuck up a whole bunch of stuff from parenthetical notation to putting periods in the wrong place.
Properly documenting sources isn’t hard at all, particularly when MLA and other formats are so readily available; I think it may just take some serious consequences and threats to make students comply. I know that’s really the only thing that works for me, and as an ABD I’m supposedly to know that shit like the back of my hand.
Well, another update- I emailed the instructor about the paper and she basically just repeated what she had said before, so I went back and looked at my paper CAREFULLY to see why I totally bombed that part. I then checked the course reader for the citation model I based it off of…
…It was the wrong one. I was writing an article summary, but the model I used for my citation was for an on-line text. I had gotten mixed up because I had gotten the article ONLINE. In her email, she mentioned the page that the correct model for the citation was listed. Gohhh chalk it up to casual ignorance to destroy my confidence in writing papers! :smack: