In my high school, we always used the MLA format when doing bibliographies and I always thought that MLA was the law. Because I used it so much I deemed it as the supreme ruler of the citation world.Even though I always used the MLA form, I never learned the format of it because we were always encouraged to just use websites such as Noodle Tools and Easy Bib. When ever a question came up about citing a source, the answer was always, "Oh, just type it all in the Noodle Tools and it will do it for you." I feel like that attitude won't cut it in a college course because there are so many different ways to cite sources, and sometimes professors will make their own ways to cite sources.
According to Hjortshoj, there are other ways to cite sources like the APA and CMS. I must confess. I knew these existed, but I never knew that they were actually used. This shows a huge difference between high school writing and college writing because I am now expected to be able to use different ways of citing a source. Luckily, there are many ways that I could learn to use APA and CMS. For example, Hjortshoj lays out very explicit details on when to cite and how to cite correctly.
There are sound reasons for the differences in format.
ReplyDeleteMLA tends to privilege who did the research over its currency. APA puts date after an author's name because in the social sciences, the currency of research becomes vital. In the humanities, for instance, Poe's theory of the short story still informs contemporary writers.
CMS is my least favorite, since the footnote is such a print-technology convention and until MS Word got footnoting features, adding them was a labor of futility.
That said, CMS endnotes could become live links to a page of notes in an online project.