The New and Improved Style Manuals

Several years ago, the Modern Language Association issued a new edition of the MLA Handbook. The handbook, now in its seventh edition, was revised to better suit academic writing and research in a digital environment. But even though we now regularly write papers that rely entirely on online sources and incorporate a variety of electronic media, not everyone is aware of the changes. 

Here are just a few of the key updates in the seventh edition: 

• Citations for online sources do not need to include a URL. The rest of the citation provides enough information that the reader will be able to find the source through a search engine or database. Moreover, URLs are not necessarily stable; a link that worked at the time of writing may be dead before a reader sees it. 

• For in-text citations from online sources like Web sites, there's no need to use a paragraph or section number in place of a page number, unless the source itself is already numbered. 

• Now that we have an incredible variety of media at our disposal, making the medium of publication clear is important. Citations should indicate whether the source was Print, Web, Radio, Television, DVD, Film, PDF, etc.

• Computer keyboards have made it much easier to italicize than underline. Anything that used to be underlined, such as book titles, should now be italicized.

For a more complete list of the changes in the seventh edition, click here to download a PDF compiled by Bedford/St. Martin's. 

The APA Publication Manual was also recently revised and published in a sixth edition. Like MLA, APA style now better supports writers working with online sources. (Click here for a brief overview.) Students writing in education, business, psychology, and other social sciences are likely to find APA style more useful, as well as the format used in much of the source material they will encounter in their research.

MLA has always been the preferred style for scholarly writing in the humanities, but since it also provides highly detailed information about using and citing a wide variety of material, it's also appropriate for projects that may include both traditional and nontraditional sources (even Twitter).

The Wrong Way You Were Probably Taught Grammar

Yesterday Professor Michelle Navarre Cleary was a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio’s The Kathleen Dunn Show. During the hour she discussed, in short, the wrong way to teach grammar.

Many SNL students probably remember having to memorize parts of speech, complete grammar drills, and—perhaps the worst of all—diagram sentences. Research has shown, however, that teaching grammar before students are allowed to actually write is counterproductive, serving only to produce “people who are terrified to write.”

It is the rare person who steps into a writing course or approaches a writing project completely free of anxiety. “Writing is hard,” and “good writing is clear thinking,” Navarre Cleary explains. And sometimes, “it’s easier to worry about where the comma goes than to really push yourself to clarify your ideas.” But if you allow yourself to be challenged—by answering classmates’ questions about your work, your instructor’s questions, and your own—the grammar will follow naturally: “it’s in that effort to communicate that people start to learn what makes sense in terms of arranging their words in sentences.”

To listen to the full recording and hear more about why you should give yourself permission to quiet your inner copy editor, click here.

ALSO: Don't forget the deadline to submit to the Writing Showcase is April 1st! 

"Rules" and When to Break Them

At some point in your education—elementary school, junior high, high school, perhaps even college—you likely had an English teacher who would have told you the following sentences are grammatically incorrect:

“And the class went out for coffee after the exam.”

“She needed to immediately get the notes from a classmate.”

“Which chapter did you find that quote in?”

Each of these sentences illustrates one of the common myths of English grammar: don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction; don’t split an infinitive; and don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Each has an easy fix:

“The class went out for coffee after the exam.”

“She needed to get the notes from a classmate immediately.”

“In which chapter did you find that quote?”

But did these sentences need fixing? Not at all, according to an article from Smithsonian magazine. The first rule—don’t begin a sentence with a conjunction—likely came about as a way for English teachers to encourage sentence variation and avoid writing like this from their young students: “And then we went to the park. And we watched the baseball game. And my favorite team won.” The second and third—don’t split infinitives and don’t end a sentence with a preposition—are the result of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century academics trying to impose the rules that govern Latin grammar on English.

That said, there are plenty of grammar and usage rules that we do need to follow, rules that even experienced writers sometimes have trouble with. Just don’t let the ghost of your seventh grade English teacher keep you awake at night.