I Learned Something New

I learned today that there are a number of official styles for documenting citations in scholarly works, as well as formatting such works. The style that I am presently trying to better understand and apply is the MLA style.

MLA stands for “Modern Language Association”. Here’s an excerpt from the MLA web site about their style:

All fields of research agree on the need to document scholarly borrowings, but documentation conventions vary because of the different needs of scholarly disciplines. MLA style for documentation is widely used in the humanities, especially in writing on language and literature. Generally simpler and more concise than other styles, MLA style features brief parenthetical citations in the text keyed to an alphabetical list of works cited that appears at the end of the work.