“Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA).”
“Control sentence-level errors (grammar, punctuation, spelling).”
One of the last things I do when writing my essays is switch it to MLA format. Compared to the essay as a whole, this is relatively easy. All I have to do is switch the font, size, and spacing to fit the format, then add page numbers and some details about the paper above the title. The more difficult part is the citation, which have rules that can be a little confusing and hard to follow, depending on what sources I’m working with. Despite this, I think I have done a good job of fitting my sources into the MLA format, even when I am not given details like the title, or the source is a little unclear. This is the works cited page from my chosen work sample:
Turkle was relatively easy to cite, because a lot of information was given within the paper handout, and the rest I could just find on the internet. Citing my peers, on the other hand, was a little more difficult because they didn’t have titles and aren’t technically published with a company. So, I just took the site from where they were posted and used that instead, and used a name related to the assignment/content in their works.
As far as grammatical errors, I always try my best to fix those as soon as I write them, often going back to fix something that wasn’t spelled correctly or just didn’t sound right. Although, I do miss some mistakes on the first run and get to them when I comb through the essay later on. For example:
Here, I forgot a period after the parentheses and the second part of that sentence just didn’t feel right. So, I changed it to this in my final essay:
I caught my mistake and connected the sentences to make them more flowy, and I continued to do this throughout the essay.
