how MLA 8 & 9 work (this lecture is mainly FAQs)

Admittedly, this is not a riveting lecture, but so many students no longer know how to do this (or just are not taught it in middle school or high school, where it has always been taught).

First, MLA 8 and MLA 9 are essentially the same. MLA 8 came out in 2016 as an attempt to deal with the massive amounts of new e-sources flooding the world. MLA kept trying to add rules for each separate source type, but how does one do Instagram differently from Tik Tok and Twitch? They sort of gave up hope and created some more-generic rules. MLA 9 uses the same rules, but it is an expanded style guide with more information than 8.

the logic of MLA 9 - and how has MLA 8/9 changed?

All standard formats (MLA, APA, CMS, etc.) have their own internal logic. But the same is true of all writing formats (writing a patient chart, filing a police report, legal documents, even resumes and business letters). MLA 9 is one of the standard academic formats required in many college/university classes. Once you understand the purpose and why things are organized as they are, the mystery of them clears up pretty quickly. All do take practice, and memorizing is not as helpful as just looking up examples.

Here's a statement some of you will just not believe: MLA is not hard; it's just picky. The same is true of APA, CMS, and all other standardized formats. If you follow the step-by-step instructions (on the set-up videos, on another set-up video you look up, on the references, such as the MLA SAMPLE file in the Files section here on Canvas), it's just like assembling something from IKEA. You DO have to follow the steps or your new Kallax shelves will be not quite right, but if you do just follow the steps, you will have nifty new storage for all of your board games (or whatever).

MLA 1-7 were all fussier than MLA 8/9; that's because The Modern Language Association (MLA) sort of gave up. So many new electronic source types started appearing (How do we document a tweet, something on SnapChat or Tik Tok, a streaming video on BritBox, a blog, and on and on, and so they dumped the idea of just creating new rules that would work only for, say, Instagram or a file on a CMS like Canvas.

the key to the MLA 8 changes

They created containers. By the way, this is covered in one of our readings/references, or you can read more about it on the MLA site or the Purdue OWL site if you want more details. The change is not new; it goes back to 2016.

ROUGHLY, they tried to normalize things like "all print sources and even print-like sources on the internet" by breaking down what was most important for any reader who wanted to look up the source you claim to have gotten information from. Why would a reader want to do that? Well, things like ChatGPT (which we DO NOT USE in this class) sometimes make up sources that don't actually exist. Readers might want to fact check claims in an essay or check whether the essay takes the words from a source out of context to mislead the reader.

I'm pretty sure you are all aware that misinformation is a big deal thing in the 21st century. The lovely term "fake news" gained fame in the 21st century. And that's one reason why documentation is important; avoiding plagiarism is another. So let's dissect a very simple MLA 9 Works Cited entry for a book with one author:

Klosterman, Chuck. But What if We're Wrong? Penguin Books, 2017.

(note that I truncated the title by removing the subtitle, and that's OK; MLA 8 actually streamlined Works Cited entries)

Think of three containers:

  1. Who created this? [Chuck Klosterman]
  2. What is it? [a book titled But What if We're Wrong?]
  3. Where/When is it from? [a publisher named Penguin Books from 2017]

So it's sort of Who, What, Where/When; that is a very old, logical pattern for describing things like articles in a magazine or even YouTube videos.

And the system is flexible. If something is missing (like a date), we skip it (simple); if an author's name is not given, we skip it (simple). In older versions you had to put things like N.D. or Anon. They simplified the system.

following are questions i've often gotten from students (with answers)

Why isn't the title enough? There are actually two (or more) books in print with the title But What if We're Wrong?, and they are different books. Why not just the author? Klosterman has written more than one book. So why is the publisher and date useful. There are different editions of the book with different page #s, so if your citation had "Blah blah blah" (Klosterman 211), the quoted passage MIGHT be on page 211, but it might not.

So all of that stuff is useful and necessary.

OK, so why do we need all of that junk for internet sites; why isn't the URL enough? Things move around the internet, a lot. For example, most of the TED Talks on my 103 reading list have moved multiple times. Also, some things on the internet get updated (changed) often. So what you quoted from the 4 Sep 2020 article might not be there in the 12 May 2022 article.

Well, why the fussy stuff, like having the site name in italics: Forbes, for example? It always has been; that's a rule of English, not MLA. Basically short works (stories, episodes, articles) get quotation marks; longer works (books, shows, magazines like Forbes) get italicized.

How about changing period space space to period space or changing September to Sept. to Sep or removing https:// from the URLs? That's all about keystrokes on a computer keyboard; it's being simplified bit by bit. At least ALL of the months are now consistent, not some three characters and some four characters (May, June, Aug, Sept).

Why are things like movies different, often starting with the movie title and followed by the director's name? Many people do not think of the director or screenwriter or producer and which takes precedence, so MLA has, for a very long time, used movie title as the way most will recognize a movie. Part of that helps avoid the "should we put the director or writer?" dilemma.

Is everything in MLA 9 logical and consistent. Of course not, but most of it actually is, and once you spot the patterns and/or search out specific examples (how do you cite a table in your research paper? for example), it gets easier and easier.

TWO LAST THINGS THAT BUG ME (they don't really bug ME, but some students don't like them):

What's with that Hanging Indent (sort of the opposite of paragraph indentation in the body of the paper) on the Works Cited entries? That's easy; it makes it simple to see where one entry stops and the next one starts. Remember, the goal is to make this easy for your reader.

Er, OK, but why are things like double spacing throughout NOT DEFAULTS in Microsoft Word (the most popular software for word processing)? Well, yes, it is annoying to have to change Multiple to Double and Before and After both to 0 and such, but that's because Word (part of Office) was made for business. That extra spacing between paragraphs is BECAUSE they do not indent paragraphs in business writing; the extra spacing shows where the new paragraph starts. Indenting paragraphs in English (in general) is standard; Business English is different.

the logic of MLA 9 - useful information for the reader

This mini lecture is actually a copy/paste of one of my responses on the discussion board (I do hope you are all reading those). It is about matching parenthetical citations to Works Cited entries making it easy for your reader.

To put this in context, the student put this in the body of an essay: "Blah blah blah" (The Guardian). No, it didn't really say "Blah blah blah," but I'm keeping it simple.

The Guardian is not an author's name; it is the site name (actually the name of an online British newspaper) and is italicized after the article title (that part you did). The article has no named author, so author is skipped, and this Works Cited entry begins "The 50 Albums..." Now that gives us pause when alphabetizing. Works Cited entries are put in alphabetical order (I will explain the logic of this below).

Articles, books, etc. WITH LISTED AUTHORS are alphabetized by the author's last name (which is what appears first in the WC entry. Wakeman, Steve is alphabetized with the "W"s). But what if no author is listed? First, as noted above, you then leave it blank (ANY missing element is left blank, so if there's no date, leave that blank). You begin the entry with the article title in quotation marks, and THAT is what will go inside the parenthetical citation in your paper. But there are a gazillion "A"s, "An"s, and "The"s in titles, so we skip those. In this case, that leaves us with "The 50..." so "50." How to you alphabetize "50"? #s are alphabetized before letters, and the start at "1" and go up, so "10 Things I Love" would go before "30 Days on a Sailboat."

Why alphabetize? Alphabetizing the Works Cited makes the entries easy to search. If they are in random order or put in order of appearance in the paper; they would be HARD to search if a reader wanted to look up and check your source based on something you quoted/cited.

Why must whatever is first on any Works Cited entry match what goes in the parenthetical citation? Because that's how the reader knows what to search for alphabetically. Without that (or with something different) it would be horrible to try to locate a source in a long Works Cited list. And they CAN get very long in some classes. So in the following partial Works Cited entry, if the parenthetical citation has (The Guardian) your reader would have to work to SPOT The Guardian in a long list of Works Cited entries:

"50 Albums that Changed the World." The Guardian,

Can't you just do a computer search with CTRL+F? Maybe, but most of your college papers are likely going to be turned in on paper, printed out. You can't do a "Find" on a paper document.

tl;dr

I certainly do hope you read all of that and will ask questions if you have them. Not reading is the main reason students struggle in these courses, but let's say you like to SEE things to understand them.

To SEE what this looks like when correctly done, click here to see a paper with quotations, parenthetical citations, matched to the Works Cited. This paper has highlighting (yours will not) just to make the quotations/citations/connections to the Works Cited clear/obvious.