Why is MLA format the way it is?-Podcast

WHY IS MLA FORMAT THE WAY IT IS?

"Everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion, but everyone is not entitled to his own facts." -Daniel Webster (i think) Hook Draft When I think of the MLA, I think a little bit of the CIA, a faceless organization with great power and a desire for world domination. Except, for us, our waterboards are works cited pages and coordinating conjunctions. Seriously, since so many of you hear your professors talk about the MLA and about why it is so important to follow the format, I thought I'd explain the way a tutor sees the Modern Language Association. I'm not telling you the official story. You can get that from their website. I'm telling you a tutor's perspective on the situation. 

 The MLA is the way it is because we wanted a system that would be credible to a wide audience, that would treat other people's work with respect, and that would make the job of professors a little bit easier. I. Audience related issues- Because we wanted to insure maximum readability. a. English professors and scholars in similar fields. b. From multiple cultures. c. Perhaps far in the future. d. who are busy, skeptical people The Modern Language Association format came about for a number of different reasons. The first reason relates to issues about audience. We wanted a system that would help us to be credible with large audience. The first reason also relates to jealousy. Scholars in my field are a little bit jealous of science. One reason that science is so successful is that it is cumulative. Scientists build on the work of other scientists in order to make discoveries, and the reason they can do this is the scientific method. There is a standard for running experiments and reporting information which allows other scientists to build on earlier work. Everyone trusts the credibility of the science of the past. No matter who you are, you get in a car and expect that it will work. Even the critics of science get in an airplane that is designed according to very strict scientific laws. But what about new science? When a new scientific study comes out, why do most people believe it? The answer to that is simple. Scientific writing has a standard format. Scientists describe what they did in great detail before they tell you what the results were. They have a standard format which makes it possible for absolutely anyone to check the results. If you don't believe them, run a copy of that experiment. If you don't believe them, scientists make it easy for a person to see the truth for himself (or herself). The MLA format is our attempt to create a similar standard. Academics in the MLA wanted to create a standard, so that scholars and thinkers from multiple cultures could read each other's work and build on the ideas of the past, so we created a format that makes it easy for anyone who doesn't believe us to go and check our conclusions. So the first reason MLA is the way it is, is because we wanted to make it easy to check on our ideas. The second reason involves the song Happy Birthday. I hope you all know the song. I've been singing it at parties for years. However, I bet you didn't know this. If I sang "Happy Birthday" in front of my class as a teaching demonstration, I could be sued. Happy Birthday is a piece on property. A company owns it, and they will only let it be used under certain circumstances. You can sing it for free all day if you follow those rules. If you break those rules, you are stealing and they can sue. Their rule is that you can't sing the song in an environment where money is being made. If money is being made and "Happy Birthday" is involved, the company that owns it wants to get paid. The second reason MLA format is the way it is, is about property rights. Some people make cabinets and some make ideas. Professional writers make ideas, but here's the trick, ideas are always built on the back of previous ideas. With the exception of creative writing, all writing requires sources. The MLA is a system for making sure those sources get recognized and, sometimes, paid. So we made the rule that anytime a writer uses the words, the ideas, or the information of another, that use must be acknowledged. If the use is exact, we quote the words and cite the source. If the use is inexact, we still cite the source. If a student doesn't do that, he or she is stealing ideas. Changing the words doesn't change where the source came from. Teachers get paid to help us learn and sources get cited for helping us learn. As my friend Aaron Kerley once put it, "if I steal a car and then put another coat of paint on it, it doesn't magically become my car. It is a stolen car." So the first reason MLA is the way it is, is in order to be credible to a wide audience. The second reason why the MLA is the way it is, is to protect the property of thinkers. III. Convenience Issues -To save time and avoid confusion a. Headers were developed to help professors deal with large stacks of papers. b. Works Cited pages are arranged so a reader can quickly scan a large list in order to find a desired entry. The final reason that the MLA is the way it is, deals with the job of being a professor. Profesors deal with large stacks of papers all the time. Sometimes professors are well organized and sometimes they are not. The header information that is required in MLA format is to help professors keep papers organized. If a paper is placed in the wrong filing cabinet or the wrong mailbox, including the name, date, teacher, and class on the top left side of the first page means that anyone who finds it can quickly place it where it is needed. The name and page number that goes on the top right of the other pages has a simple one, staples. Over time or because of a bad stapling job. Papers sometimes come loose. The name and page number make it easy to get every page into the right order. Many of the other peculiarities of MLA style have this explanation. We use hanging indents on the works cited page so that it is easy to search through a long list to find exactly what you want. We don't include the year in with our in text citations because the humanities, unlike science, doesn't change much over time. Hamlet today, contains the same exact words that it did 50 years ago. So there you have it. We didn't create this system to torture you. We created it to gain credibility with a wide audience, to handle other people's ideas with respect, and to make it easy for professors to handle large numbers of papers. Now you know why the MLA format is the way it is. The hard part is what comes next, using MLA format to create a works cited page.