MLA Style Quick Reference

MLA Style Quick Reference
Style guides are mostly designed to be read and studied. They are reference works, so this is as it should be. But if you are simply trying draft a paper in MLA style, learning how to use the style is about as much fun as reading the phone book. The MLA Quick Reference takes a different approach.

The MLA Handbook (2003) presents a couple of sample pages to show how copy manuscripts are to be formatted. But if you are looking for additional information, you must search the index and find the appropriate page. To use the index you must already have a good command of the vocabulary of MLA style. Did the chicken really come before the egg, or is this too a Catch 22? The page-turning and head-scratching can become formidable. There is a better way.

Popups? This is an obvious application for a hypertext electronic document. Point the cursor on a feature and click the mouse button to get an explanation, a popup note. The World Wide Web is a hypertext medium, but popup notes have been so abused for advertising that many browsers have built-in popup killers. The MLA Quick Reference uses a different tool.

Windows? The original Microsoft Help system produces hypertext documents, much like Web pages. It has the added virtue of enabling very precise formatting, something the current systems do only with great difficulty. The MLA Quick Reference uses this system. It works with a reader that is already installed on Windows PCs (screen shot).

Download, unzip, install: MLA Quick Reference (ZIP 500KB).

MLA Guide Home Page

Just three pages are needed to represent the basic features of MLA style as applied to research papers. These are the title page, a table and figure, and a page from a reference list. Click on any feature on the page to get an explanation in a pop-up note.

Amazon.com

Gibaldi, Joseph. 2003. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: Modern

Language Association of America. Link to Amazon.com: ( Paperback $17.00, 361 pages).

The MLA Handbook documents a style especially appropriate for scholarship in literary fields. Coverage of documentation formats for text citations and references is excellent, occupying about a third of the volume. Other sections introduce the process of research and writing, and the mechanics of punctuation, mostly quite conventional. The new sixth edition has relaxed requirements for using brackets in quotations and expanded coverage of referencing Internet sources.

Fall 2007