MLA as Genre Element
Affiliated Project: Project 2: Researched Essay
Purpose: This activity encourages students to see citation as a rhetorical activity aimed at a particular audience rather than as an annoyance or plagiarism deterrent.
Description: Students will reflect on the rhetorical purpose of citation styles and consider how the different conventions between style guides speak to audiences with different values and priorities. You will need examples of at least two different style guides (I use MLA and APA).
Suggested time: 50 minutes/entire class period
Procedure:
Part One: Begin by pulling up an example of APA citation style. As students if anyone is familiar with APA and, if so, in what contexts they used it. Explain that APA is often used in fields like psychology and other social sciences. Point out the way APA style emphasizes the date in both citation and reference entry, asking students to speculate about why. Connect this emphasis on the date to the way research in science and social science fields is constantly evolving and how important the currency of research is in those fields. You can also point out that in many cases, APA does not require a page number, because the focus is on the overall contribution of the research rather than a specific statement or piece of data.
Now pull up the MLA example. Ask students to speculate on the differences between MLA and APA. What fields often use MLA? What values and practices are different in these fields, and how does the style change to reflect that? You can point out the way MLA emphasizes page numbers in text, and their relative de-emphasis of the date, because of the way texts using MLA are often concerned with more specific, sentence-level ideas. You can also call attention to MLA's requirement that you specify the medium of the source at the end of the reference. What values do the fields using MLA hold, and how are these reflected in the style?
Part Two: Split students into groups and tell them now it's their turn. Ask them to reflect on the community of college composition. What values and priorities are held by this community of practice? What is important to them and to their instructors? Have students imagine that they have been tasked with creating a new style guide to be used in college composition classrooms. What elements will they include, based on the values and priorities they have discussed? What material will be included in text? At the end? In what order? Does the required information change depending on the type of source? After they create the guidelines for their new style, ask them to create example in-text and reference page examples for both a book and a website.
As they finish, ask groups to write their examples on the board. When everyone is done, have each group explain their style guide to the class, explaining why they made the choices they did and how this reflects their rhetorical situation and their audience's values. Optional: have students reflect in their journal on citation style guides as rhetorical practices and genre elements.