Sunday, September 19, 2010
An Overview of MLA Format
If you aren't familiar with MLA here is a quick overview.
MLA is the traditional format used in colleges. It make it easier for the reader to verify your sources. You can cite quotes, paraphrasing, and ideas in two ways.
1) Direct citation: Brent Wilson, an academic who has done extensive research on yaoi and culture, states that yaoi allows women to re-imagine their identities.
No parenthesis are needed since I made it clear what I was citing in the text itself.
2) Parenthetic citation: Men use the camera as another penis in porn with which to capture the objectified person featured (Dworkin 42).
In a parenthetical citation, the author or title will be cited, depending on the first word of the entry in the citation. If the work is a book, the page number(s) where the quote or idea is found is also included. This makes it easy to find the citation when you look at the Works Cited at the end of the essay.
This is what the in text citations above would look like in the Works Cited:
Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Woman. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981.
Wilson, Brent and Toko Masami. “Boys' Love, Yaoi, and Art Education: Issues of Power and Pedagogy.” Semiotics and Art/Visual Culture. (2003): 20 October 2008. <http://www.csuchico.edu/~mtoku/vc/Articles/toku/Wil_Toku_BoysLove.html>.
Now you can see for yourself if what I'm referencing is accurately presented!
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In the English class I took just over the summer, we were told that MLA has really recently updated their requirements for the Works Cited entry formats for online sources. No longer do you include the URL, since these days the URL of a page is not always the same forever, or, in the case of flash-run websites, the page you're referencing may not even have its own URL and must be navigated to anyway. I need to see if I can find where I put the sheet we got in class with the changes, but I think it's just replace the URL with "Online." instead.
ReplyDeleteHuh. None of my professors have ever corrected me on it.
ReplyDeleteWell. I'm including the URL for this blog anyway, so people can get to the stuff.
ReplyDelete