The Secret of MLA Style

Usually the summer is when Sarah Juliet, the editor at Studies in the Fantastic, the academic journal on which I am associate editor, and I put together our fall issue. My role is usually to do later passes, after SJ and the writer have worked through things back-and-forth a bit. The writers have responded to peer-review comments and SJ's queries, and then I go through, editing for citations and adherence to MLA style, but also making any other comments I see fit, or sometimes weighing in on anything still uncertain between SJ and the writer.

It's a process I enjoy—enough that I've been wondering if I should pick up freelance copy-editing work or something—but also it is frustrating. Mistakes I hammer into my AWR 201 students are still being committed by people with Ph.D.s in English! Now, if they weren't doing this, I would have little to do, but it has made me wonder if I should be a bit more understanding of my students' mistakes if people with Ph.D.s commit the same ones...?

Nah.

(I do think, though, that if you have a Ph.D., you ought to be able to figure out how to give your Works Cited page a hanging indent in Microsoft Word.)

I often get praised for my master of MLA style, and I don't know if it's the kind of thing one should be praised for, because to me, it just comes naturally. What I mean by this is that I think I've always been pretty good at grasping systems; I blame being the child of two engineers. My siblings are engineers, and while that has no appeal to me, I clearly have some of that mindset myself.

What can be tricky about MLA style is that it can feel like there's fifty different formats with fifty different rules. But that's not really true, and what I liked about the 2016 eighth edition changes to MLA style is that they made the systematization even clearer. In the old days, you might cite a journal article like this:

Mollmann, Steven. "The War of the Worlds in the Boston Post and the Rise of American Imperialism: 'Let Mars Fire.'" English Literature in Transition 53.4 (Aug. 2010): 387-412.

But why a period after the volume number of the journal and a colon after the date? Why does the date go in parentheses? And it's all a bit inscrutable anyway—you can only know those are volume and issue and page numbers if you already know MLA style! MLA8 (which has since been superseded by the mostly identical MLA9) simplifies and systematizes things. This is how you would cite that now:

Mollmann, Steven. "The War of the Worlds in the Boston Post and the Rise of American Imperialism: 'Let Mars Fire.'" English Literature in Transition, vol. 53, no. 4, Aug. 2010, pp. 387-412.

It took me a bit to get used to the changes, but I came to really like them. More information is clearly labelled now: we now at a glance that "53" is a volume number, "4" an issue number, and "387-412" a page range. Even better, punctuation has been systematized. Instead of having to remember that some things are followed by periods and some by commas and come by colons and some go in parentheses, there's a fairly simple system.

All citations break down into five (potential) parts. (I don't describe it here quite like how MLA does in its own materials, but the end result is the same.) These are:

1. author information (who wrote it)
2. title information (what's it called)
3. publication information (where and when was it published)
4. container information (where can you find the publication)
5. access information (when did you access it)

Not all of these apply to every source; the example I've been using above needs only #1-3. The thing to remember is that after each of those parts, you end in a period. If one of those parts needs multiple pieces of information, you connect them with commas. So for a journal article, the publication information consists of the journal title, the volume number, the issue number, the date of publication, and the page range, so that all gets strung together with commas. Easy!

Once you know this, it's easier to cite anything; you don't need bespoke formats for every possible kind of citation. There's not, as far as I know, an official MLA format for a story in a comic book, but I can whip one together easily for a story I read this morning:

Van Meter, Jen, writer. "Spin Cycle." Justice Society of America 80-Page Giant, no. 1, DC, Jan. 2010.

You just string all the publication information together with commas. (This comic didn't use page numbers.)

So I still do make my students responsible for MLA style, but what I try to emphasize is that it's a system. I don't expect them to memorize individual citation formats, but the skill I think they should be able to develop is to use a resource like a handbook to understand that system and apply it. That's how I teach it—and it also seems to me that that's the thing someone with an English Ph.D. should have learned how to do as well, even if they don't have an engineering brain.