So my son and daughter indulged in a little online bantering this week, one complaining about being required to write a paper in APA format and the other bragging, "I get to use MLA! Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyaaaaaaaaaah-nyaaaaaaaaah!"
Okay, I may be exaggerating just a little, but there's no denying my delight in seeing my very own precious adorable children publicly debating the merits of APA vs MLA. It warms my heart, I tell you. Every semester I hear students asking why we have to bother with citation at all, why it matters where we put the period or whether the title is italicized or what sort of source it is to begin with-- "Why can't we just list Google as the source of everything?! It would be so much easier!"
I rarely win that argument. Yes, I can hold the gradebook over students' heads to persuade them to pay some attention to the details of citation, but deep in their hearts they remain unconvinced. They'll write citations to humor me and earn a grade, but the minute my back is turned, they'll Google their lives away and burn their MLA guides. (All those colons make good kindling!)
But perhaps there's hope! My children are not my students so I never tried to teach them MLA citation format, but they learned it somewhere along with a love for precision and professionalism and clarity of expression, and that's something to brag about. My children care about APA vs MLA! My life has not been lived in vain!
2 comments:
Open up the MLA handbook at random, and find:
Boroff, Marie. Language and the Past: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1979. Thus I demonstrate three things: I can't format accurately within this box; there's some irony in a quotation from Chicago being cited in the MLA handbook; fondness for piffle.
D.
I think I've figured it out a bit: give students an assignment where they have to figure out where other sources come from in a slightly frustrating source!
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