MLA Format A Necessary Evil
By Sam Cross
Staff Writer

Louis Menand, graduate of this fine institution and author of many a serious and prize-winning book, wrote an article for the New Yorker recently about the pleasures and aggravations of formatting and what’s becoming of those in the era of Microsoft Word. Menand begins his article by remembering, or possibly imagining, a late-night tussle with a final essay here at his alma mater. He describes the absolute impossibility of formatting a bibliography in the days before computers, but hastens to add that computers have really just made the difficulties more intransigent and various.

I feel that I’m uniquely qualified to discuss the difficulties of modern bibliography, or End Matter, as Menand capitalizes it, given that I was experiencing them myself not twenty minutes ago. The End Matter (or, as I would have it, the Portion You Put In So As Not To Be a Plagiarist) is, as Menand accurately describes it, a thicket of rules and concerns, none of which the tired undergraduate actually cares about after one in the morning.

But, the End Matter isn’t really a unique portion of an essay, I hasten to add. It’s simply a heavy construction zone, the place where the rules come into play most savagely. Anyone who’s ever idly wondered whether their name goes on the left or right upper portion of their essay and then has made the decision arbitrarily, should know this. Essays are, from one (very pessimistic) perspective, a sort of writing that you have to do under the watchful, beady eyes of the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style or MLA Handbook (I prefer the Handbook gaze, myself.).

Menand spends a great deal of time on the interesting vagaries of the new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style and comes to the conclusion that while rules of style are definitely arbitrary and made more so by the absolute impossibility of internet citation, they’re wonderful, valuable things to have, because they make writing interesting, and also a task requiring some knowledge and skill. While this probably isn’t the opinion of most people who’ve just forced out a thirteen-page essay about the sublimated topography of the Victorian body and are hoping very much not to see the sun rise, I think it is one that those who write seriously and enjoy writing should agree with.

Rules of formatting are often tedious, sometimes contradictory, and always difficult to locate when one needs to know them. However, if one has to look for them, it’s usually because one has encountered a difficulty of style in the free-flowing grace of one’s own expository prose or in the furious concentration of a bibliography, that one cannot resolve on one’s own. A difficulty of style, to my mind, is really a choice between sounding foolish to people who know more than you or shading what you have to say with a quietly professional tone. Even if that tone involves the proper abbreviation of “Cambridge University Press.”

Style, when it comes down to it, is a knowledge of these rules and a tactful ability to decide when and how to follow and break them. Certain rules should probably be kept all the time, such as putting your name on a paper or alphabetizing a bibliography. Adherence to these will keep your professors from laughing at you and will possibly also prevent you from getting the grade you deserve if those are the sort of mistakes you’d make.

On the other hand, as Menand points out playfully and at length, whether or not one is going to capitalize the word “Communism” can become an opportunity to look into the subtleties of language and also to wink knowingly in that New Yorker way at those readers of yours who will understand the cunning of your stylistic decisions. “Ah,” they will say, “here is the sort of writer who probably reads complex postmodern fiction when he’s in the mood for something light and plunges into Proust in sudden bouts to assuage his melancholy.”

For this sort of subtlety to work, though, rules of some kind are necessary, and it doesn’t matter in the slightest if there are several sets of rules out there. My copy of the MLA Handbook sits immediately next to my Bible (which would be more telling if I were more Christian). It isn’t exactly a holy text, but I get a sort of pious, self-righteous warmth out of applying its arbitrary dictates on formatting to an essay when I know that a professor prefers footnotes instead of Works Cited.

Appreciation of others’ styles, and formulation of one’s own, depend absolutely on standards. While gleeful schadenfreude at reading over the stylistic blunders of others, which I ruefully admit is a favorite pastime of mine, is not the most noble experience with literary standards and forms, there are many valuable, less snide ways to appreciate genuinely the plethora of rules and regulations that govern style.

Or, maybe the rules are just worth enjoying because they’re interesting. Menand professes, tongue undoubtedly in cheek, a desire for a style sheet so vast in its scope that it would encompass all of written language. While this would, perhaps, defuse the perilous excitement of clashing stylistically with a professor who has a tendency to use “quote” as a noun, it would also be vastly more desirable than the present mess of indecision and equivocation that is the “internet citation” portion of my treasured MLA Handbook. It would also provide the ultimate beginning from which all those with higher stylistic aspirations could to begin knowingly to depart.

I like my rules, and I join Menand in lamenting their gradual decline into laxity, although I will feel very differently, I’m sure, when next I struggle with alphabetizing my bibliography.