Wozworld’s Weblog

If the state of the world is not ticklish enough these days, MLA has made some radical changes in their new edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Writing, 3rd edition, published 2008, and now available in Cook Library Reference and Reserve collections at REF PN147.G444 2008.  The student handbook edition, namely the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, will not see a revision, however, until its next publication, which will be Spring of 2009.  So currently, the two different print editions of MLA style guidelines are showing conflicting data. 

The Online Documentation by Diana Hacker web site, a source held near and dear to many of us and linked on my resource guides and the Cook Library web site, has an update that you can download that explains the major changes.  They have decided not to change their examples on the web site until the student handbook is published next year, in 2009.  At this point, both Hacker and MLA are leaving the choice of which set of guidelines to use to individual instructors .

After reading through the Hacker update and looking at the new edition of the MLA Scholarly Publishing manual, these are the major changes that I can see.  This list is by no means exhaustive, but points out some changes that were notable (at least in my humble opinion):

• Titles of books, periodicals, websites are no longer underlined, but are now italicized
• web documents without pagination or numbered paragraphs are now treated as unpaged in an in-text citation
• bibliography entries will now always have a word that describes the medium of the source: print, web, DVD, CD, cassette, performance, etc.
• MLA no longer requires the use of of a URL in bibliographic citations for any web based media, including databases and individual websites
• MLA now requires a web site’s sponsor or publisher or a “N.p.” abbreviation in bibliographic citations
• in citing works from a database, the name of the database is given in italics, the medium (web) and date of access – you no longer have to note the library and university granting access to the database or the URL
• unpaged articles in online journals will show a “N. pag” abbreviation in bibliographic entries

The update booklet is free and available for printing directly from the Hacker site.  Here is a link to the URL for the booklet: http://www.dianahacker.com/resdoc/pdf/Hacker-MLAupdates.pdf.  I would strongly recommend that any instructor using MLA this and next semester download the 56 page booklet and read through it.  The changes that I have noted above came from my reading of the booklet, then my examination of the Scholarly Publishing manual.  The Cook Library MLA style tips guides will not see an immediate revision this semester, but will be revised when the new edition of the MLA Manual for the Writers of Research Papers is published in 2009.