Sunday, March 1, 2009

MLA

Source citations are useless!
As long as you can get back to the source, you should be fine. To what point and purpose do we spend half the paper-writing time piecing together what will invariably be an incorrect source citation? You can never find all the information you're supposed to include and its always out of order, or you can never figure out what type of source to cite it as. In the end, you waist time trying to follow an unclear and overwhelmingly ambiguous format; you still don't get it right and even worse is the fact that you had that much less time to work on the content of your paper.

Your paper is handed back a few weeks later. A web of red exes, circles, and arrows of rearrangement covers the entire bibliography, worth probably up to a fifth of the total grade. You can tell more time was spent revising this single page than all the other pages combined. The content and your analysis of the information, the very piece that most proves to the world that you are NOT a babbling idiot, has become second to how well you are able to figure out an ever changing mess of syntax.