Why learn MLA or any other format?

In My Humble Opinion
1

As I mentioned in another thread my 8th grade son is having to write a paper in MLA format. I guess his english teacher is quite the MLA technocrat/perfectionist as well as jumping on the slightest grammar errors (ex. commas, improper referencing, improper font or size, double spacing correct).

I’m having trouble telling my son a reason to learn to use such a format since I myself never had to use it till graduate school. Personally I feel it is only important to learn to do if your going into academia or some other field where one must submit papers or write books.

This is why I need your help. Especially you all who submit papers for publication.

  1. Is MLA the most common format used? Not to pick on MLA because it is just one of many formats.

  2. It seems to me the guidelines for such formats were pre-internet and the proliferation of web based reference material makes creating references extra difficult. Ex. you might reference a websight which could be taken down at any time. Do you find referencing web based material difficult?

  3. How “exact” do publishers want a paper? I mean are they like 8th grade english teachers ready and poised with their red pens ready to pounce on you about any mistakes in proper formatting as well as grammar? Isnt it an editors job to fix such errors? Would a publication reject your paper and send it back to you because they felt your formatting didnt follow exact guidelines?

  4. If your submitting a paper, say a paper for your masters thesis, and assuming you’ve done a decent job with your grammar as well as referencing your sources, would the board of review throw it out if your formatting isnt totally correct? I mean isnt the content of a paper more important than proper formatting?

  5. What jobs or careers do people need to be really good at writing using correct formats? I dont see it for say a career as a journalist, technical writer, novelist, speechwriter, game designer, scriptwriter, or most any other writing based job.

Thanks.

2

The answer is citation management software. It does all the formatting for you, perfectly, in whatever format you want to use.

3

If you can’t bother to format it correctly, why should I be bothered to read it? If you are so sloppy in your write-up of a formal paper, why should I trust your methodology and research?

4

  1. MLA is the most common format used in the humanities. Formatting isn’t random–a properly formatted bibliography entry will tell me a great deal about the type of source used–and how seriously I should take it.

  2. Yes, the standard formats were created prior to the existence of the internet. And yes, it is more difficult to cite internet sources–they don’t all fall neatly into the standard source types. Websites that disappear tend not to be appropriate for scholarly writing. Readers need to be able to consult the sources used.

  3. Publishers are unlikely to review work full of grammatical errors and/or work in which the author does not follow scholarly standards with respect to citations and bibliography. A few inconsistencies in formatting won’t be a deal killer although they’ll need to get fixed before publication.

  4. A few errors will not be a deal killer. But a thesis full of such errors won’t be taken seriously. If your boss wrote memos full of grammatical errors, what would you think of his or her competence and intelligence?

  5. All careers require people to adhere to professional standards, whatever they may be. All careers require the ability to follow instructions. Learning scholarly standards is good practice.

5

More than anything, people need to be able to read citations and footnotes and understand what they mean. People who have not been trained tend to entirely gloss over where notes are and what they say. In anything even slightly academic, this is like listening to a stereo recording on one speaker. People who know how to pay attention to the notes–to what they mean–are reading with a running commentary not just on what is said, but where information came from and to what degree and in what ways it is reliable. They have a sense of the writer’s approach, methodology, and bias, and they come out not just with a sense of what that one author said but of the overall academic discussion surrounding the topic–and they know what to go read next and how to read it.

All that starts in middle school with putting together citations using some stylebook and using sources to develop an argument.

6

Curious. Does anyone actually check the sources for accuracy? I mean like go and finding the book to see if its the correct page and such?

7

I didn’t learn MLA in middle school or high school.

But I did learn that I needed to format my papers to a certain standard. In high school, my AP English teacher insisted on Kate Turabian’s style guide. If we departed from it, our papers would get marked down.

What did this teach me? That there are rules in writing besides grammer and spelling. There are rules in everything. You can either cry about it or play the damn game.

8

Scholars may not be checking for accuracy–but they may want further details. Finding that the citation is fake will not help the author’s reputation.

I’ve worked on scientific papers to be submitted to professional journals. Yes, the idea is to get everything into excellent shape before sending it away…

For this student’s project, the goal is to teach hiim one format. His future work may lead him to other formats. Or to another field entirely–but detail work is always important.

9

I will often follow citations in footnotes in medical or scientific journals to find additional articles. I’m not checking for accuracy, but I appreciate that they are almost always correct.

10

Yes.

I had a grad school classmate who was caught plagarizing because the professor checked her sources and found she’d lifted an entire paragraph.

And some instructors are now requiring their students to submit copies of journal articles/book chapters they’ve taken information from along with their papers–to make sure that students are not only NOT plagerizing, but that they aren’t falsely attributing anything either. I imagine the latter is a lot easier to get away with otherwise, especially if a source is an obscure one.

11

I had a high school history teacher in the early 1970s who was a stickler for proper citations, the Turabian/Chicago Manual of Style citations that are more unwieldy than MLA or APA. Hated it.

Graduated, worked for 10 years, then went to university. Knowing how to cite properly, in fact, just knowing that was a thing, was a big advantage. I even wrote the teacher a thank you note.

It matters at university because, you know, form and content in peaceful coexistence. Profs do check on the sources, to find a book or article a student used they hadn’t heard of, to check a quote that is interesting or odd, to check for plagiarism, and they prefer the citation system they are used to when they check.

And sometimes citations are used like the brown M&Ms story about the rock band: at glance, you get a sense of whether the job was done properly.

Few much care if you use single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks, or vice versa, but many will note it so you learn for next time, as they might correct spelling and grammar. Undoubtedly it is also about training people to conform to imposed, essentially meaningless standards, which is part of what universities are set up to do, but that’s another thread.

It’s true, these are conventions that will rarely matter outside of university, but for 4-5 years, they will matter, and it’s nice to know that stuff before you start university, so you can devote more time to learning about more important things like sex, drugs, booze, and whatever the latest iteration of pop music is called.

12

Yes. My college professors certainly did (and I graduated in 2014). And they had me use both MLA and APA and some of them were lax on it, but the ones who weren’t, literally took points off because it wasn’t correctly done.

There are websites that instruct you in exactly how it’s done. It’s not hard. It’s not rocket science.

13

This. Even Word has a function I used for all my grad school papers.

I’ve haven’t used MLA since undergrad.

14

MLA itself isn’t important. But style in a given work should be consistent. Many writing jobs require adherence to a style guide, which covers far more than reference format. But for reference format, I’ll echo others and recommend reference management software, either Word’s or any of several other programs.

Students should be able to understand and follow a style guide. MLA is just a convenient one. I’m partial to ACS.

15

Learning to follow directions is an important part of life. Learning MLA format is a nice tidy way to learn to follow directions without teachers having to make up all sorts of stupid exercises. Also, it’s way less nebulous than English grammar.

Dude, anyone who can’t follow formatting guidelines shouldn’t be getting a graduate degree. Okay?

The long answer is yes, they will bar you from getting the degree if your thesis/dissertation isn’t correctly formatted. Where I got my graduate degrees there was a person whose entire job was to check them for formatting errors. A single period, a single page number, a tenth of an inch on the margins, and he sent you away. We called him the Formatting Nazi.

16

Echoing others that learning MLA itself is not especially important, but understanding that written work typically has an expected style and learning to implement that style is a valuable skill. I am a researcher and write lengthy technical reports. While we do have an editor who reviews my work for consistency with our style guidelines, I am expected to come pretty close. The end product is much better if the editor can focus more on the content and flow of the writing and less on whether four should be spelled out or written as a numeral in a given sentence. I will admit, however, that I just put a link to any references in a comment and let the editor deal with making the reference list. But that’s the privilege of being senior enough to be able to ask other people to deal with crap I don’t want to deal with myself. :slight_smile:

17

This article from the New Yorker explores the seamy underside of citation standards…

“Two-thirty is by no means an unreasonable hour of the night. You anticipate a decent five or six hours of sleep before class time. And you are, of course, so wrong. You are not nearing the finish line at all. There is a signpost up ahead: you are about to enter The End Matter.”

18

This depends. My school had minimal requirements other than a large left margin (for binding.) I’m not sure anyone actually read mine, let alone paid attention to formatting.

A friend got his PhD at TAMU, and had to maneuver his through a very involved dissertation office.

19

That was an astonishingly long-winded whine that’s ultimately about the author’s poor time management, difficulties with following instructions, and inability to use computers.

20

As technical editor of an online journal, I tend to be very flexible on formatting questions. But we have our own “class” file (this is a latex thing) and if your paper won’t compile using it, I send it back to the author. But the class file imposes our standards for the most part.