(Document Work MLA) – Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA). (Word Count 285)
At the beginning of the semester I approached my writing solely with the intention of getting my ideas on the page. I would completely ignore any formatting obligations until the last step of my revision process. In fact, my rough draft for my first paper didn’t include an MLA header, title, or quote references (Image 1 and 2). This habit developed in high school as I never took the time to learn proper formatting. Instead I looked to the internet to create citations for me, and I looked at google images of MLA formatting to see what it was.
Paper #1 – Rough Draft First Page
Rough Draft – Paper #1 Quote
As I began to write more papers I came to memorize how to format the beginning of a paper and use quotes in the essay. An example of this is in my first argumentative paragraph of my second essay. The green and orange identifies the use of parenthetical citations. The green is an embedded quote; the purple shows the use of a signal phrase to introduce a quote; and the orange identifies the use of direct quotes.
Final Draft – Paper #2 First Argumentative Paragraph
This use of quotes has become second nature to me. I feel as though I have significantly improved my awareness for proper formatting. Another instance when I used MLA format was with my works cited page. In this example, the sources from Biss and Cadogan were accessed online, Chen was from the Emerging anthology, and Coates was from a book, and so I had to construct each citation differently.
Final Draft – Paper #3 Works Cited Page
One area that I still feel the need to work on is my works cited page. Although all three of my work cited pages were correct, I still have not memorized the differences between citing articles versus books, websites etc.
