Students Fail to Read Sources Deeply

The Citation Project, a national study of 174 student papers from 16 colleges and universities, is examining how students use sources in their research papers. Here are some highlights of the preliminary findings, released this year:

Students rarely cite material located very far into sources:

46% of all of the citations that students made are to the first page of the source, and 23% are to the second page.

77% of all of the citations are to the first three pages of the source, regardless of whether the source is three pages or more than 400 pages long.

9% of the citations are to Page 8 of a source or beyond.

Sources are misused in one of five citations, and citations almost always draw on very short passages:

Of the 1,911 student uses of sources that the project coded, 4% are copied and cited but not marked as quotations from a source; 42% are copied and marked as quotations; 16% are “patchwritten,” defined as “restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source”; 32% are paraphrased; and 6% are summarized.

20% of the source uses represent a misuse of materials, with students failing to mark them as quotations or patchwriting.

96% of the source uses show students working with two or fewer sentences from the text rather than engaging with a sustained passage in the source.

More than half of the papers misuse sources:

Of the 174 papers the project reviewed, 19% included at least one instance of copied material that is cited but not marked as a quotation; 91% included at least one instance of copied and cited material marked as a quotation; 52% included at least one instance of patchwriting; 78% included at least one instance of paraphrasing; and 41% included at least one summary.

56% of papers misuse sources by either failing to mark copied words as a quotation or by patchwriting. Of those, 15% did both.

Source: The Citation Project (via The Chronicle)

I suppose we shouldn’t be altogether surprised that students deal so poorly with source material; we were, after all, students once. I clearly remember looking for quotes to “plug in” to papers I had already completed as faux evidence that I had done a modicum of research. It is furthermore true that my students seem to understand what constitutes plagiarism less with each passing year. Nevertheless, I think what is most troubling about these results is that they are symptomatic of a failure to instill in our students the ability and the inclination to engage with broad arguments (that span more than three pages) and critically evaluate the conclusions they draw.¹ If we cannot inspire students in the humanities to think critically about the sources they read and judge strictly the conclusions they contain —in primary and secondary sources alike— there is little to be gained by asking them to read from these sources at all. Our first goal² must be to give our students the tools and the desire they need to engage deeply and analytically when confronted with new information. Once they learn to think rather than parrot, and to approach new conclusions skeptically, as one among many, rather than as dogma handed down, perhaps then we can hope that reading will no longer be a rote exercise in scouring source material for quotes, but a consequence of a thirst for intellectual stimulation and challenging debate; and using quotes correctly and in context not a matter of convenience, but of honoring another’s intellectual labor. Why have we pursued academic careers if not for the challenge and stimulation of thinking our way through puzzling plots, literary or otherwise?

Footnotes

1. I am reminded of the Director of Jihad Watch Robert Spencer’s editorial in the Brown Daily Herald after his campus lecture in 2007. In it he points out that no one had refuted his arguments about the scriptural justification for Islamic violence committed against unbelievers. The audience, he notes, opted instead to vilify his argument (not his evidence) as an incitement to violence against Muslims. I was not in attendance at the lecture, and however poisonous his politics, I am sympathetic to his accusation that students were unwilling to “engage intellectually” with an unwelcome and troubling point of view. ↩
2. After teaching them to write, of course. ↩

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
—Benjamin Franklin

In the life of an academic, there are several more things that can be said to be certain. Among them the surprisingly difficult teaching philosophy statement, the concept of departmental service, solitary office hours, the vagaries of academic writing. And, like clockwork, the student evaluation.

In a world of increasing precision and carefully controlled experiments, the student evaluation is on its best days a blunt instrument. It is a tool meant to distill a semester of teaching down to its essential qualities, privileging, as it were, the concise over the precise, the opinion of the student over the intent of the professor, the fleeting, momentary conviction over the enduring understanding.¹ It is often the only (nominally) meaningful feedback we get from students. It is permanent, and its indelible judgment can weigh heavily, for better or worse, on the young academic’s future. Yet they cannot answer some very basic, very important questions about the students and classroom that produce them. Put another way, student evaluations fail by asking students to reflect without also asking them to self-reflect.

Student evaluations are on some level a tacit affirmation that student experience is at least as important as an instructor’s expertise or the actual process of learning in the classroom. With that in mind, there are two modes of self-reflection students should be, but are not asked to produce when filling out evaluations. In the first place, they are asked to reflect on their experience of their instructor —what did they like or not like about the instructor, about the class?— but never to reflect on why the instructor may have assigned a certain disliked task, emphasized a certain intricate point.² Neither, in the second (and more egregious) place, are students expected to reflect on their own role in the creation of their learning environment.

I would like to dwell on the latter of these two points. If students do not understand why the classroom is being run a certain way, or do not understand the meaning of a lesson or an assignment, the instructor is (generally) also partially to blame. Students deserve to be let in on the process of learning, at least at the level of course, class, and assignment goals and objectives. But ultimately what is lost in these situations is the possibility of a single more meaningful experience. When, on the other hand, we allow students to fail to understand that they too have roles to play in the creation and realization of their learning environments, we sacrifice something of much greater value: the opportunity to be co-creators in the classroom, the chance to bring students into the conversation as conscious collaborators in the experience of learning, and the responsibility to pass along the tools they they need to learn independently once they leave the classroom.

In the few years I have spent before a classroom, I have been on the receiving end of a few astonishingly negative evaluations from students that grossly misunderstand the course objectives,³ misread numeric scales (resulting in positive comments juxtaposed with negative numbers), blame me for departmental policy, judge me more than the class I ran, and critique how I chose to teach the material over whether I helped them to master it. Each of these reveals a powerful and problematic lack of self-reflection. To take such evaluations seriously, a number of other questions would have to be answered: To what extent did you feel invested in improving the quality of this course? Did you ever approach your instructor about your concerns? How well did you get along personally with your instructor? How would you describe the dynamics of the classroom? In what ways did you contribute to those dynamics? How often did you miss class? What do you think your daily responsibilities consisted of? How prepared did you feel for class on a daily basis? How have the most recent classes affected your perception of the course as a whole? The answer to each and every one of these questions would color any student evaluation, from the most positive to the most negative, not least because it would require to student to evaluate him or herself as well as the class and the instructor. We would be forced, then, to understand each one in its strikingly heterogeneous context.

As my graduate school department’s student evaluations stubbornly failed to address these concerns, I began to implement my own (unofficial) solution to what were seemingly intractable problems by designing my own mid-semester feedback forms. For the past several years, these brutally, breathtakingly honest moments of student self-reflection have been far and away the most useful and revealing snapshots of what works and does not work in my teaching. In keeping these evaluations fully anonymous —in the age of computers I no longer recognize anyone’s handwriting, and wouldn’t care to if I did— and by letting my students know how seriously I take their opinions (despite the low stakes of the evaluation itself), they are relieved of any “responsibility” to mince words. In permitting me to ask the questions I truly care about, and in allowing my students a productive outlet for the expression of honest classroom frustrations, these short forms have become the foundation of my reflective teaching practice.

As a way into a discussion of the broader usefulness of mid-semester feedback, permit me to comment on a selection of key quotations from a recent edition of The Chronicle:

More and more professors are using midterm student evaluations, experts say, and more and more colleges are strongly urging their faculty to collect student feedback midway through their courses. Stony Brook this year put in place a universitywide online system for collecting midcourse feedback. Professors and students are not required to use it, but university officials are hoping that both groups will see its benefits and use it to improve classrooms.

Growing use of midcourse feedback comes amid debate over how much emphasis colleges, departments, and instructors should place on student evaluations completed at the end of terms, and to what extent the information should be used to measure the quality of instructors.

—Brenda Medina, As Emphasis on Student Evaluations Grows, Professors Increasingly Seek Midcourse Feedback

While I am an enthusiastic proponent of mid-semester evaluations, I am profoundly reticent about giving administrators access to those evaluations, as well as the notion that a standardized mid-semester evaluation is the best solution.⁴ Though better than the blunt instruments normally used at the end of a course, the moment self-designed mid-semester evaluations become administratively mandated is the moment they lose the basis of their power and charm: anonymity and low stakes. As Medina notes,

Because midcourse evaluations carry lower stakes than those at the end of a course, faculty members can use them often to ask tougher questions. Sometimes, Ms. Davis said, end-of-semester questionnaires do not ask the right kinds of questions for giving professors the information they need to improve their teaching. Professors who use midcourse evaluations say they believe they get more-honest feedback from students in the middle of the term than they get at the end, in part because the professors can use midcourse evaluations to ask directed and open-ended questions.

By raising the stakes, university-mandated mid-semester evaluations would lose the essential quality that makes them so effective: the private dialogue between student and professor, in which both reflect on their roles in the classroom not as an end in itself, but as a means to a better endpoint.

At Stony Brook, the online form the university provides for midsemester evaluations includes two open-ended questions: What does the instructor do particularly well? And, what could the instructor do better?

This strikes me as a very limited set of questions. By focusing exclusively on the students’ perception of the instructor, the evaluation denies the opportunity for students to recognize themselves as agents of their own instruction. In an attempt to affirm the stake students have both in helping me to adjust my instructional practice, and them to adjust their involvement in the classroom, to work better for everyone, the mid-semester evaluation I use asks the following questions:

1. My expectations of this class were…
2. Is the class meeting these expectations? If not, please explain.
3. My experience of this course would be improved if I would…⁵
4. My experience of this course would be improved if the instructor would…
5. The most helpful aspect(s) of this course is/are…
6. The least helpful aspect(s) of this course is/are…
7. Please add any additional comments about the course or about the instructor that you wish to make:

If it is of administrative interest to collect the kind of information mid-semester evaluations reveal, the solution is of course to adapt final student evaluations to look more like mid-semester evaluations. And indeed, a few small adjustments and simple shifts in verb tense transforms this same mid-semester evaluation into a beginning-of-semester evaluation, and later into an end-of-semester evaluation. The result is a productive stop-motion animation of how student expectations of me and of themselves evolve over the course of a semester. One rarely finds adulatory pull-out quotes in these evaluations, but they are, in my opinion, the only ones that demonstrably improve my teaching practice.

Footnotes

1. It is fair to say, I think, that even the most thoughtful student cannot know the impact a course will have one, five, or ten years down the road. ↩
2. That many instructors would be unable to answer these questions themselves indicates a troubling lack of self-reflection on their part. ↩
3. Usually my own fault in part, but when student have listed “learning grammar” as the main objective of an advanced composition course, for example, I have looked elsewhere for the breakdown. ↩
4. While I do think that my mid-semester evaluation would be useful for instructors in any field, I am wary of the implication that mandating uniformity is a good idea. ↩
5. I added the word “would” at the end of this and the following question after a significant number of students in one semester used both as an opportunity to comment on the way I ran class, rather than using the former as an opportunity to reflect on their own preparation and engagement. ↩

Enter, curiously, Orson Scott Card. I have long celebrated science-fiction as a medium for re-presenting real, present problems in an unfamiliar context (a thought recently echoed on NPR in an interview that I cannot seem to find). Card made a name for himself upon publishing the phenomenally successful Ender’s Game, the story of a genius child who is selected to attend the prestigious “Battle School” and, ultimately, to lead a team of other children into battle against the Earth’s alien invaders. After spinning Ender’s Game out into a quartet of novels, the latter three of which follow the details of Ender’s life in space thousands of years after the battle is over, Card produced another quartet —the Ender’s Shadow quartet— which follows the life of Bean, one of the graduates of Ender’s army, on Earth in the years immediately following Ender’s victory.²

As blurbs on back covers would have it, the three latter books in the Bean quartet tell the story of the ascent of Peter, Ender’s brother, as the “Hegemon” who will unite a fractured world populated by battle-trained genius children. Bean comes to his aid, along with a number of other Battle School graduates, by taking command of Peter’s army. Together these characters work to eliminate those who profit from the uncertainty that threatens to splinter the nations of the world into warring factions, to take on those who would unseat Peter as Hegemon (or nullify his influence), to predict what will happen as events unfold, and to do their best to steer and alter the course of world events. And this, essentially, is what the books are about.

That and, you know, sex.

But wait! Not the kind of hot, steamy, consequence-free sex we have come to expect from books that labor under the (often unfortunate) epithet “fantasy/sci-fi.” Indeed, at bottom, the latter three books of the Ender’s Shadow quartet detail the shockingly prosaic story of two people trying, despite all odds, to have babies.

Granted, these people are geniuses who spent their childhoods playing war games in a desperate attempt to save the Earth from alien invasion, only to return to the Earth they saved and spend their adolescence trying to avoid being drafted or forced into military service at the behest of whatever country claims to be their “home.” Granted also, the human-engineered genetic illness that they are laboring to eliminate causes Bean to grow disproportionately quickly, acquire disproportionate intelligence at a disproportionately young age, and die disproportionately early. Granted, finally, that of the ten viable blastocysts created by Bean’s mad scientist endocrinologist and embryologist are stolen by an evil genius trying to take over the world.

But let’s back up for a moment, because the story that underlies these extraordinary circumstances is profoundly ordinary. Upon returning to Earth, Bean is convinced, against his better judgment, to reconsider his decision not to have children. What he does not reconsider —and what most poignantly parallels the situation I am familiar with— is his unwillingness to pass his genetic condition on to his progeny. In order to have his way, he enlists a battery of medical techniques that seem like science-fiction, but which (I assure you) are very real. They all fall under the umbrella of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), but we prefer to call it, affectionately, “having babies the hard way.” First, Bean and Petra must find a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility (REI) specialist who can harvest a number of Petra’s eggs. The is the first step of the more well-known process of in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Because they are not dealing with infertility, but rather are trying to screen out a genetic condition, each egg must be fertilized with a single sperm injected directly inside its cellular wall. Genetic screening is a precise science, and one cannot run the risk that another, less successful sperm cell gets accidentally tested and throws off the results. This process of direct injection is called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Some three days after fertilization, allowing enough time for the blastocysts to divide up to three or four times (for a total of 8 or 16 cells), one cell is carefully extracted, and run through any requisite genetic testing, a process called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) or pre-implantation genetic screening (PGS). Statistically speaking, 50% of the fertilized eggs will carry the genetic condition and will be discarded. The remaining few will either be injected into the would-be mother’s uterus, or frozen for potential future use. After all that, the chances that the egg will implant and be carried to term are approximately 30%.³

Bean and Petra have literary necessity and science-fiction on their side. Upon realizing that their REI doctor is in fact an evil madman, they escape with all 10 fertilized eggs, but no idea which ones carry the genetic condition and which don’t. Petra, nonplussed, has one injected into her before the remaining nine are kidnapped and injected into other women. Miraculously, all ten implant and are carried to term.⁴ The remainder of the quartet, on some level, is about Bean and Petra struggling to recover their nine missing children, determine which ones carry the genetic mutation, and figure how to keep them alive until a cure can be manufactured.

Broken people saving a broken world, trying to keep each other whole. We should all be so lucky.

Footnotes

1. Forget about all the other terrifying conditions that one isn’t testing for. ↩
2. The first book of the quartet, Ender’s Shadow, is a brilliant narration of Ender’s Game as it unfolds from the perspective of Bean. ↩
3. Realistically, the process of viable egg attrition is much harsher. Many extracted eggs will not be mature enough to fertilize. A certain percentage of the remaining fertilized eggs will not survive to day 3. Of those that do, some will not survive the cell extraction process. Of those that do, some will not survive the extra 1-2 days it takes to perform the tests. Most couples are lucky to be left with a mere one or two viable, healthy fertilized eggs by the time the process is over. ↩
4. Parenthetically, Petra never considered one other procedure that could have alerted her as to whether the fetus she carried was affected by Bean’s genetic condition. The procedure, called chorionic villus sampling (CVS), involves extracting a cell from the placenta after 11-12 weeks of gestation. Since the DNA of the placenta are genetically identical to the DNA of the fetus, this allows one to test for genetic irregularities while posing minimal risk to the fetus. ↩

One month ago today, I married the girl of my dreams.

Despite a little bit of rain, the weekend came off spectacularly. None of the preparations went awry at the last minute (at least, none that didn’t fall under the heading “Acts of god”). Favors were made. Vows were written (and rewritten). Tables were assigned (and reassigned). The Van Dyck proved, as we hoped it would, to be a lovely space for an indoor-or-outdoor wedding. Rabbi Matt Cutler of Congregation Gates of Heaven said many beautiful things, and truly made the ceremony a spectacular event. Tears were shed. We served delicious food, what we’re told was the best wedding cake people had ever had (Bravo, Villa Italia!), and everyone seemed to have a delightful afternoon. By the end of the day, we were married. All told, a very successful wedding.

But, in the charming words of my beloved wife, all of this “wow” would have been merely “w–” without the extraordinary talent and dedication of Mr. Collin Morgan, who graciously agreed to do all of the design work we required for our book-themed wedding, and inventively realized most of our design ideas beyond anything we imagined. We were also fortunate enough to be blessed with the creations of an assortment of other artists, whose works are also included in this post. All the artifacts pictured below are entirely of Collin’s design, except where otherwise noted. All photos are hosted in high-resolution on Flickr. All rights to the photos belong to the photographer as noted in the photo description; all rights to stationery designs belong to Collin Morgan.

Save the Dates

The idea for our save-the-dates —one of few design ideas that was not book-themed— was L’s. The photo was taken by her brother A with a Nikon D60, and subsequently edited by Collin. Trust us, our hands do not look this lovely.

Invitations

Our invitations came in five parts. The invitation itself is an old-school book slip. Guest’s names were hand-written under “Borrower.” The date of the wedding —June 6 2010— was listed as the call number to avoid any confusion about response card due dates.

Response Cards

The response card was, of course, a library card application. The “Clayman Matthews Library” logo in the upper left hand corner makes several other appearances throughout this collection of wedding paraphernalia. Each guest was assigned a unique number in the patron ID field, just in case any cards were sent back nameless. Several couples/families objected to the “I”, and obligingly crossed it out and wrote “We” instead.

Information cards

To remind people of the existence of our wedding web site, we included an information card in the form of a card-catalog entry with some important information. We manually punched a hole in each of these for authenticity. Note the finely-realized water stains in the background!

Barbecue invitations

Finally, we asked Collin to create an invitation to the barbecue we held the day before our wedding. Our specifications included only light text on a dark blue background for a 5×7 card. Hours later, it became clear what was taking so long, for this is what Collin delivered. And this is why we love him. We were delighted that this invitation to a casual barbecue was far fancier and more elegant than the invitation to the wedding itself. We reused this design for our guest book, below.

Central Park maps

L, intrepid mapmaker that she is, drew this map to help people find the pavilion in Schenectady’s Central Park, where the barbecue was held. Note that this map is decidedly not to scale.

Escort Cards

Once it was revealed that L’s mother had an old card catalog drawer tucked away somewhere (to store her old cassette tapes), and her father revealed his portable typewriter, this was an obvious choice. Turns out it’s pretty hard to find anyone who can do typewriter repairs these days, but we managed to find a place not far from Providence. We picked up the repaired typewriter on our way to Schenectady, and L finished typing these up less than 24 hours before the ceremony, with help from her brother’s girlfriends. What you can’t see is that each card is typed up individually with the guest’s name and table assignment.

Guest Book

A guest book is, of course, already a book. But a book about books seemed fitting. Among the awards garnered, one finds “Best Book of the Millennium”, “Best wedding ever!”, “Pulitzer Prize”, “Nobel Prize”, and “Academy Award”, not to mention first edition copies of books such as Yaaaa buddy!!! and Observations of Permanent Human Mating.

Not wanting to impose on Collin’s good graces any more than we already had, we reused the barbecue invitation design to invite people to sign.

Card Drop Box

L’s mother contributed this idea. These hollowed-out books were a fortuitous find; our work was limited to carving a card-sized hole in the top, and finding the “A” and “Z” bookends to hold them up. We put our pens inside mugs labeled “K” and “L,” not pictured here.

Program

The length of this program speaks, I think, for itself. L and I put a tremendous amount of work into writing and formatting the text. The book jacket design is based on an early invitation design mock-up Collin had done for us. This seemed like the perfect manner to put his valuable work to good use. The text of the jacket (and any typos) were supplied by us. Collin realized this design in about 4 days, and we managed to finish affixing the book jackets to the programs the day before the wedding.

Rings

We always planned for the rings to be delivered in a hollowed-out book. Initially, we considered using The Princess Bride or Through the Looking Glass and carving the pages out ourselves. L’s mother’s hollowed-out books worked even better. L superglued ribbon inside to secure the rings, though not before supergluing the ribbon to her fingers first. Luckily, this was our only wedding-related injury.

Favors

Easily the most frequently brought up wedding-related conversation, and most frequently changed wedding-related idea. Of course we ultimately decided on books. The notebooks are from Moleskin, and the names stamped on by hand. The first page of each booklet is embossed with the official seal of the Clayman Matthews Library.

Ketubah

This beautiful ketubah —the Jewish marriage license— was painted for us by L’s aunt Claire. It features two intertwining trees as pictured in all four seasons. It is both gorgeous and meaningful, and L and I couldn’t be more excited about how it turned out! The text in the center, in Hebrew and English, contains legal (i.e. halachic) information about the marriage, as well as some of our promises to each other.

Huppah

Our huppah was created in part by each and every member of our immediate families. Each family member received a square and instructions to decorate it however they pleased. L’s mother and grandmother quilted the squares together to create the canopy. Like the ketubah, we are absolutely thrilled to hang such a beautiful, tangible work of art and reminder of our wedding in the new home we’re creating.

Beginning from the top left, the squares were created by my mother, my brother Scott, L’s brother Ben, L’s grandparents, L (in memory of her paternal grandparents), my grandmother, L’s father, L and me, L’s mother, my father and his wife, my brother Brian, my sister Morgan, L’s brother Andrew, my sister Shannon, and my maternal grandparents.

Thank You Cards

Like our Save-the-Dates, but with the appropriate alterations.

In conclusion…

Many many thanks to Collin, Claire, and our families for their endless patience, and the tremendous work they did for us. We owe them cookies, beer, and eternal gratitude.

If you’ve happened on this post and are in the midst of planning your own wedding, we wish only to leave you with these words: Remember that the details make it special, because they’re yours, but the most important thing is that they be a source of fun, not stress. If any of these images or designs spark your creativity, we are delighted to have helped. If you wish to use any of the images pictured here wholesale, please do, but remember to give credit where credit is due (i.e., mostly to Collin; a note on Flickr and short line in a wedding program will suffice).

More wedding photos will be arriving soon on Flickr! Check back soon! Did you take pictures at our wedding that you would like included on Flickr? Drop me a line!

(And a final parenthetical about Diana and Scott: We jest, of course, and mean no disrespect. In fact, we adore what they did, and were quite inspired by some of their design ideas and decisions, as you can plainly see if you glance at their images.)

Edit (20 May 2010): updates to book and book chapter/excerpt formats to allow for e-books.

Edit (31 May 2010): “Interview” format updated to properly format published and unpublished interviews from books and/or journals, within reason.

Edit (28 June 2010): “Print Magazine” format created to properly format print magazines. Note: The “Newspaper” format can also be used to format magazines, so long as you don’t include any extraneous information, such as “Section,” etc. MLA doesn’t want much from magazines, so the format is pretty sparse.

Edit (18 February 2011): Corrected and minor error in the “Multivolume Work” format.

Edit (25 February 2011): Corrected errors in a number of formats where “Ed.” means “Edited by” and therefore should not become “Eds.” when there is more than one editor. (The only place “Ed.” should become “Eds.” is in an edited book.)

I’ve spent a long time over the last couple of years tweaking the implementation of MLA in Bookends, and decided to take the last few days to clean them up, standardize (to the extent possible) the fields where each bit of information goes for different reference types, and make them publicly available. Feel free to grab the formats, but also be aware that using them requires some user intervention, and that they are not perfect.

It’s been years since I’ve had a clean installation of Bookends, but I don’t think I’ve mucked up any too many of the default settings. That is, if you need to switch back and forth between MLA and some other system, you should still be able to do so. If you do discover evidence to the contrary, please let me know and I will try to fix it. The reference types for which I’ve noted “Same as built-in MLA” indicates that I haven’t modified anything. Often this is because I’ve never cited anything of that type, and so have never checked whether Bookends implements it correctly or not.

The implementation of the MLA 7th edition relies heavily on the use of metatypes. Most of the functionality metatypes allow can be adapted to single references, but using metatypes keeps the information neater and more organized. If you are averse to metatypes, I offer the following (old) formats “as is,” without any guarantees that they work as they should:

• Multivolume work, 1 volume: a. t. $Ed. $e. u2$ ed.$ $Trans. $u3*. l: u, d. $Vol. $v ~of ~f`.` $Ed. $u8*. u13~ vols.~|$ $u12`.` where u2 is the edition, u3 is the translator, u8 is the editor of the complete set, u13 is the total number of volumes, and u12 is the years over which the complete set was printed. Most of these can be omitted.
• Anthology excerpt or reprint: a. "t." $Trans. $u3*~.~ v. $Ed. and trans. $u4*~. ~ $Comp. $j~. ~ $Ed. $e. u2$ ed.$ l:~ ~u, d. p-. u18. $Rpt. in $u14 $Excerpt from $u15 where u3 is the translator, u4 is the editor and translator, j is the compiler, u2 is the edition, u18 is the medium, and u14 is the volume in which it is reprinted, and u15 is the volume from which it was excerpted. Most of these can be omitted.

Finally, I welcome any format modifications or simplifications. I am fairly certain that all these formats work as MLA wants them to, even in most cases allowing unnecessary information to be omitted. I do not, however, pretend that they are elegantly expressed.

Setup

Here follows a list of all reference types included in this implementation of MLA 7th edition, as well as the Field Labels, in order. You can create these reference types and edit their corresponding field labels in the “Refs” tab of the Preferences.

I will only note where reference types depart from the following basic set of field labels. Bold text indicates that the field must be filled to generate a proper bibliographic entry. Italicised text indicates that the field is optional, but will appear in the bibliographic entry if filled.

• Author
• Title
• Editor
• [Unused]
• Volume (i.e. volume number of a multivolume work)
• Pages
• Year
• Publisher
• City
• URL
• Short Title
• Series (NB: Include series title and volume number, as desired)
• Edition (NB: 1st, 2nd, etc. Not series volume number)
• Abstract
• Keywords
• Notes
• Translator
• Ed/trans (i.e. editor & translator)
• Call Num
• ISBN/ISSN
• Language
• Orig lang (i.e. original language)
• Trans author (i.e. original spelling of author’s name)
• Trans title (i.e. title in original language)
• Orig pub (i.e. original date of publication)
• User12-User16
• DOI
• Medium (print, web, etc.)

1. Artwork: Same as built-in MLA
2. Audiovisual material: Same as built-in MLA
3. Book:
   • Pages → Total pages
   • User12 → Database
   • User13 → Access Date
   • Sample output: Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Ed. Frederick Jameson. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. Print.
   • Sample output (no author): Popul Vuh. Ed. and trans. Adrián Recinos. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008. Print.
4. Book chapter/excerpt:
   • [Unused] → Book Title
   • User12 → Anth pages (i.e. pages in anthology in which excerpt appears if this reference is an excerpt from an anthology
   • User13 → Database
   • User14 → Access Date
   • Sample output: Barnes, Jonathan. “Metaphysics.” The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 66-108. Print.
5. Conference proceedings:
   • [Unused] → Conf Name (i.e. conference name)
   • Year used for year of publication of the proceedings
   • User12 → Conf Date (i.e. Conference date)
   • Sample output: Belmar Marchante, María Angeles. “La tensión de la dicotomía del personje actor, como acción amorosa y del autor-narrador como ocultamiento: Ardanlier, Arnalte, Leriano.” Medievo y literatura. 9-12 December 1992. Vol. 1. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1993. 311-20. Print.
6. Dissertation:
   • [Unused] → Dept (i.e. department)
   • Volume → Degree (i.e. degree earned)
   • Pages → Total pages
   • Publisher → University
   • Series → Database
   • Edition → Access date
   • Translator → Thesis type
   • Ed/trans → Access’n #
   • Sample output: Last name, First Name. “Dissertation title.” Diss. University of Somewhere, 2007. Electronic Theses and Dissertations Database. Web. 23 November 2009.
7. Edited Book:
   • Author → [Unused]
   • Sample output: Nina Grabe, Sabine Lang, and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, eds. La narración paradójica: ‘Normas narrativas’ y el principio de la ‘transgresión’. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2006. Print.
8. Editorial: Same as built-in MLA
9. In press: Same as built-in MLA
10. Journal Article:
    • Editor → [Unused]
    • [Unused] → Journal
    • Volume → Vol (Issue)
    • Year → Date
    • City → Address
    • Series → Database
    • Edition → Access Date
    • Ed/trans → User4
    • User15 → PMID
    • User16 → PMCID
    • Sample output (print): Hutman, Norma Louise. “Universality and Unity in the Lazarillo de Tormes.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 76.5 (1961-12): 469-73. Print.
    • Sample output (web): Aguirre Romero, Joaquín María, and Yolanda Delgado Batista. “Jorge Volpi: Las verdades absolutas siempre son mentiras.” Espéculo: Revista de Estudios Literarios 11 (1999): n. pag. Web. 22 Dec 2009.
11. Letter: Same as built-in MLA
12. Map: Same as built-in MLA
13. Newspaper article:
    • [Unused] → Newspaper
    • Volume → Section
    • Year → Date
    • Series → User1
    • “Edition” is used for Early ed., Late ed., etc.
    • Ed/trans → Access date
    • User12 → Article type
    • Sample output (print): Kundera, Milan. “Die Weltliteratur: How we read one another.” The New Yorker 8 Jan. 2007, Reflections sec.: 28-35. Print.
    • Sample output (web): Damiani, Marcelo. “Las utopías según Jorge Volpi.” La Nación [Buenos Aires] 1 Oct. 2006, Cultura sec.: 3. Web. 23 Dec. 2009.
14. Patent: Same as built-in MLA
15. Personal communication:: Same as built-in MLA
16. Book Review:
    • Author → Rev author (i.e. review author)
    • Title → Book title
    • Editor → Book author
    • [Unused] → Journal
    • Sample output: Klinkowitz, Jerome. Rev. of The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas, by Lois Parkinson Zamora. The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 315-16.
17. Internet:
    • Editor → Site editor
    • [Unused] → Contributor (i.e. names of other contributors to the specific web page, e.g. editor, performer, compiler, narrator. Name will be output in the form that it is entered.)
    • Year → Pub Date
    • “Publisher” is publisher or sponsoring organization. If none, enter “N.p.”
    • City → Cont type (i.e. contributor type, the type of contributor named in the “Contributor” field, in any)
    • Seried → Access date
    • Call number → Genre label (i.e. for untitled works, e.g. “Home page”)
    • User12 → Version (i.e. version number of the work cited, e.g. “1.2”)
    • User13 → By (e.g. composer if a performance, author if a narrated work)
    • User14 → Last update
    • Sample output: Matthews, Kyle James. “MLA 7th edition formats for Bookends.” Synecdoche. N.p. 12 May 2010. Weblog. 19 May 2010.
    • Sample output: <Last Name, First Name>. <Contributor>, <Cont type>. “<Title>.” <Genre label>. By <By>. <Web site>. Ed. <Site editor>. <Edition> ed. Vers. <Version>. <Publisher>, <Pub date>. <Medium>. <Access date>.
18. Multivolume work:
    • [Unused] → Title
    • Volume → Total vols
    • Pages
    • Date range (i.e. years when publication began and ended)
    • Sample output: Alas, Leopoldo. La Regenta. Ed. Gonzalo Sobejano. 5ª ed. 2 vols. Madrid: Castalia, 1981-1989. Print.
19. Interview:
    • Author → Interviewee
    • Title → Int title (i.e. Interview Title)
    • [Unused] → Work Title (i.e., if part of a larger work)
    • Year → Pub Date (i.e. of larger work)
    • City → Address
    • User12 → Date (i.e. of interview)
    • User13 → Interviewer
20. Frontmatter (i.e. Introdiction, Preface, Prologue, etc.) — this is a largely redundant reference type that I will probably convert to a metatype in the near future:
    • [Unused] → Intro title
    • Sample output: Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández. Introduction. Natural History of the West Indies. By Sterling Stoudemire. Ed. Sterling Stoudemire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Print.
21. Print Magazine (Use “Internet” for an internet magazine):
    • [Unused] → Magazine
    • Volume → Section
    • Year → Pub Date
22. Lecture, Speech, etc.: Same as built-in MLA
23. Anthology:
    • Author → Compiler
    • Title → Anthology
    • Pages → Total pages
    • Series → Comp/trans (i.e. Compiler & translator)
    • Sample output: The Routledge language and cultural theory reader. Ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin. London; New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Here follows a list of metatypes to add after the built-in set, followed by descriptions of their uses. Metatypes must be added in the “Links” tab of the Preferences. The first six types are used for different types of sources within anthologies. See section 5.5.6 of the MLA Handbook 7th edition for more information. To learn how to link references together, see the Bookends User Guide.

1. Reprinted in : Original (book) — combines “Antholgy” with “Book chapter/excerpt”
   • Sample output: Derrida, Jacques. “Semiology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva.” Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Althone Press, 1987. 17-29. Print. Rpt. in The Routledge language and cultural theory reader. Ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin. London; New York: Routledge, 2000. 241-246. Print.
2. Reprinted in : Original (journal) — combines “Anthology” with “Journal Article”
   • Sample output: DeMan, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 3.3 (1976): 42-70. Print. Rpt. in The Norton anthology of theory and criticism. Ed. Vincent B Leitch. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
3. Reprint of : Original (book) — combines “Anthology” with “Book chapter/excerpt” when title of chapter changes
   • Sample output: Last name, First name. “New Title.” Anthology Title. Ed. Person 1, Person 2. City: Publisher, 2000. Pages. Medium. Rpt. of "Original title." Original Source Title. Ed. and trans. Person 3. City: Publisher, 2000. Pages. Medium.
4. Reprint of : Original (journal) — combines “Anthology” with “Journal Article” when title of article changes
   • Sample output: same as above with journal info and formatting
5. Excerpt from : Original (book) — combines “Anthology” with “Book chapter/excerpt”
   • Sample output: Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” The Routledge language and cultural theory reader. Ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin. London; New York: Routledge, 2000. 410-415. Print. Excerpt from Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. 109-24. Print.
6. Excerpt from : Original (journal) — combines “Anthology” with “Journal Article”
   • Sample output: same as above with journal info and formatting
7. Multivolume work : Single Volume — combines “Multivolume work” with “Book”
   • Sample output: Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 1st American ed. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Print. Vol. 11 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. 11 vols. 1988-1998.
8. Multivolume work : Excerpt — combines “Multivolume work” with ”Book chapter/excerpt”
   • Sample output: Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Case of Schreber; Papers on Technique; and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, 1973. 237-60. Print. Vol. 12 of The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb and James Strachey. Trans. James Strachey. 24 vols. 1973.

Known issues:

1. In cases where the editor and translator of a book are the same person, they will always be listed Ed. and trans. <name> regardless of the order they are listed in the book. See section 5.5.4. I see no way around this other than requiring the user to manually enter Ed. and trans. or Trans. and ed. into each entry.
2. Editors and translators will always be listed in the following order: editors & translators, then editors, then translators. Switching the order would be pretty trivial, though. If anyone sees any reason to do so, let me know. MLA almost certainly prefers that contributors be listed in the order they appear in the book, but as far as I know that is impossible to accomplish. This also extends to anthologies, which can have compilers, editors, and translators, all of which can be performed by one or more potentially overlapping people. Since compilers and editors seem to be mutually exclusive, and I’ve yet to run into a compiler who also translates, I believe the options I’ve included —comp., ed(s)., trans., ed and trans.— should be sufficient.
3. As far as I know, there is no way to elegantly list multiple publishers from multiple cities, e.g. New York: Random House; London: Associated University Presses, <date>.
4. Edited books whose editors are also translators will not sort properly in the reference library if “Ed/trans” is used. I’m not sure what to do about that. They will sort properly in generated bibliographies, however.
5. If you excerpt from only one volume of a multivolume work but don’t include full publication information for the whole set, the volume used should appear before the city & publisher.

Download the format

Download the MLA 7th edition format. Unzip the file, and install it in the ~/Library/Application Support/Bookends/Custom Formats folder.

Does society need a mandatory time-out? We have weekends and vacations, sure, but even those are increasingly bent toward structured pursuits. Our leisure is often as scheduled and hectic as our work—and is, consequently, just as stressful. Sabbath, with its myriad proscriptions, offers what might be the only authentic form of leisure: the act and fulfillment of doing absolutely nothing productive. If that sounds like modern-day blasphemy, it’s because it is.

—Menachem Kaiser, The Case for the Sabbath, Even if You’re Not Religious”

I am drawn to this notion for a number of reasons, not just thanks to my recent conversion to Judaism. To be sure, Sabbath observance, lax though it may be in our household (thanks in part to an imminent wedding), is also a mainstay of our observance. Gathering together to light candles, drink wine, and eat challah was the first tradition we incorporated into our weekly lives even before I began the official process of conversion. It has become not just a regularly-occuring period to put work aside and let the brain relax, work through, and return with renewed vigor, but a ready-made reason to spend time together, to be casually (if ceremonially) among friends we respect, and to dedicate quality time to extracurricular projects that are important to us.

I am inclined to agree with Rachel, who told me once that she located religion’s importance in the way it structures life, makes it cyclical, provides spaces and rituals to manage certain inevitabilities. I get the sense that she was speaking of yearly cycles as well as life cycles. Religions help people understand and deal with “blessings” and “catastrophes,” mainly the latter: death, loss, bereavement. Sabbath observance, taking time out for its own sake, seems much less consequential, but is potentially a great deal more gratifying, and not just thanks to its frequency or its spiritual foundation. Indeed, most of the rituals religions provide can be made meaningful regardless of the observer’s belief in a god or gods; the question of the connection between meaning and belief at the heart of The Atlantic‘s article is, I think, quite subordinate to the importance of structuring in unstructured time.

I will note in conclusion and in passing how curious I find it that Sabbath observance, at least in modern American culture, has come to refer specifically to Jewish observance of Shabbat. The article I quoted above was written by a reformed Orthodox Jew, and is ostensibly a review of two books by a secular Jewish author. No one asks Christian politicians —or atheist politicians, as though there were such a thing!— if Sabbath prohibitions will affect their capacity to respond to catastrophes on Sundays, but the first question on everyone’s lips when Joe Lieberman became a vice-presidential candidate was whether he would be able to work on Saturdays.¹ And I suspect that the loss of widespread Sunday Christian Sabbath observance (now largely spatially and temporally confined to church services expected to end by noon) and its status as a de facto secular Sabbath, is at least part of the reason for publishing an article like this one.

Footnotes

1. The irony is of course that Judaism provides numerous built-in contingencies for which it is acceptable to break Sabbath laws, particularly in cases where human lives are involved. ↩

Today, some top editors got together to review the 2005 policy and decided to no longer use “pro-choice” or “pro-life.”

On the air, we should use “abortion rights supporter(s)/advocate(s)” and “abortion rights opponent(s)” or derivations thereof (for example: “advocates of abortion rights”). It is acceptable to use the phrase “anti-abortion”, but do not use the term “pro-abortion rights”.

—“NPR Changes Abortion Language”

This is terrific news. I have long believed that the patently false opposition between “choice” and “life” to be misleading at best, particularly considering the calculated insidiousness with which the latter option is capable of poisoning the debate over abortion rights. While I have always advocated for pro- and anti-choice, NPR’s focus on abortion rights, rather than the act itself, is certainly more objective, appropriate and, one hopes, acceptable to both sides. Let’s hope that this marks a sea change in the terms we use to prosecute this debate, and lends some deserved legitimacy to the notion that the debate is between allowing people to make a choice, or making that choice for them.

Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry.

—“Triumph of the Cyborg Composer”

This comes from a very interesting article, but I take issue with the former of these questions and answers. As a student in an introductory counterpoint class, I wrote chorales, canons, and fugues in the style of Bach, of Beethoven, and of Brahms. Any second- or third-rate composer can write “in the style of” a great composer. What is “so special about Mozart” is that no one wrote like him until him. That someone, even a computer, can write like him after-the-fact is only as impressive as someone today painting in the style of Michelangelo.

The old authority and truth pretend to be absolute, to have an extratemporal importance. Therefore, their representatives (the agelasts) are gloomily serious. They cannot and do not wish to laugh; they strut majestically, consider their foes the enemies of eternal truth, and threaten them with eternal punishment. They do not see themselves in the mirror of time, do not perceive their own origin, limitations and end. They do not recognize their own ridiculous faces or the comic nature of their pretensions to eternity and immutability. And thus these personages have come to the end of their role still serious, although their spectators have been laughing for a long time. They continue to talk with the majestic tone of kings and heralds announcing eternal truths, unaware that time has turned their speeches into ridicule. Time has transformed old truth and authority into a Mardi Gras dummy, a comic monster that the laugh crowd rends to pieces in the marketplace.

Rabelais and His World¹

Footnotes

1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. ↩

The gestation of this post revolves around the realization that in a few weeks I am going to have to turn in a respectably well thought out, cogent paper applying Jacques Derrida’s not-method¹ of deconstruction to a literary text of my choosing. Until recently I have been consumed by something approaching intellectual panic regarding both the choice of text, and something more fundamental: the purpose of deconstructing a literary text, given Derrida’s own thinking surrounding différance and deconstruction, namely the concurrent lack of origin and endpoint. If deconstruction can never arrive at a conclusion, why begin?

Derrida seems to provide the glimmer of an answer in his own work. His abundant performances of deconstruction on the philosophical writings of his predecessors (principal among them Rousseau², Saussure³, Heidegger⁴, Freud⁵, Nietzsche⁶) are essential to the elaboration of his philosophical project, and do not shy away from a tremendous amount of self-reflection, from which we can devise a number of problems to be overcome. The first is what I have mentioned above: deconstruction does not entail a teleology and, as such, is in an essential way unable to entail an analytical endpoint. How do we overcome this obstacle within a field that demands the closure of questions raised? The answer Derrida seems to provide, never explicitly, is unsurprisingly problematic. In order to write deconstruction, he proposes, we must take recourse in writing (“in the narrow sense”); in order to escape metaphysics and metaphysical oppositions, we must take recourse inside metaphysics by provisionally reinscribing our performance in the very oppositions we hope to question, and naïvely (provisionally) forget that we have done so (à la Nietzsche⁷). Thus we are able to forget, as well, the mise-en-abyme that is deconstruction and propose for ourselves, inside this framework, a provisionally acceptable endpoint. Upon reaching our goal, we must remember that it depends on the same metaphysical concepts we proposed to escape, we must re-place ourselves with our conclusion in the abyme and realize that it therefore must also be deconstructed.

In Derrida’s terms, every text is necessarily constructed on a metaphysical foundation, for metaphysics is all we have. Constructed on a metaphysical foundation, ergo deconstructible. Wherein lies the problem?

My trouble finding a direction for this paper seemed to be a perception I can’t overcome —but which makes me profoundly uncomfortable— of a fundamental difference between the philosophical texts Derrida deconstructs and the type of literature I work with. I have asked the question above why one might deconstruct a literary text in the first place, knowing that there is no satisfying conclusion to be reached. We know that there is, in fact, no satisfying endpoint to the practice of deconstruction at all, and that it is not a means to an end but a means to another means, “a chain of signifiers” with no ultimate signified. Still, Derrida seems eminently capable of “willfully forgetting” this analytical “problem” (and thus of not being tormented by the question I am raising here) because he confronts texts that make at least an implicit truth claim, or seek a concrete answer to a question. Derrida can then question, counter and unravel these conclusions and their authors in a deconstructive performance revealing the inadequacy of their ultimately metaphysical foundations⁸. The unraveling of a truth claim is an obvious, if provisional, “satisfying conclusion” for the analytical process, even if we are forced to realize that the signified he derives is “always already” just another signifier to be deconstructed.

The texts that interest me, though, tend not to make truth claims or seek concrete answers, but rather to explicitly deny the possibility of the truth claim, or to raise questions without providing answers. In many ways one might say their authors openly posit the possibility (even the necessity) of their own deconstruction. It is difficult, then, for me to formulate what a “provisionally satisfying conclusion” might look like with regard to these texts, if only because I would not be confronting an author/text who claims to have encountered something stable; rather, I would be more or less in collusion with a text that is frank about the “reality” of its own instability and the necessity of its own deconstruction.

The only way I see out of this conundrum, at the moment, is to recognize in the negation of a truth claim an implicit (perhaps hidden) truth claim (e.g. the truth that there is no truth, or perhaps the hidden assertion of a truth disguised by the negation of truth) —or to recognize in the raising of a question a disingenuous attempt at defining its terms too narrowly— that might provide a starting point for a deconstructive reading. This seems like an exciting possibility for the kind of against-the-grain readings one strives for, but I still have not worked out intellectually just how to perform the reading, or much less to attempt to perform it on a specific text to see if it indeed yields results. I continue to feel that, to a certain extent, these points of departure don’t point toward (provisional) conclusions as (provisionally) satisfying as the ones Derrida proposes for himself.

On the other hand, and to synthesize a little what I’ve written here, I’ve been thinking about a few 19th-century Latin American positivist texts I’ve read and written about, and it’s quite clear how one might approach them and their nation-building projects deconstructively to great effect, because their stake in metaphysical oppositions is both explicit and profound. My intellectual problem is not with literature, then, but specifically with modernism’s self-conscious approach to its own instability. Unfortunately, taking recourse in positivist literature for this final paper would feel like a negation of the utility of this course and the analytical approach it espouses, a negation I would have immense trouble committing to.

NB: The question is not how?, but why? And I’ve not yet answered it. More recently —in the last few hours, while composing this note— I have had an epiphany (courtesy of Jorge Luis Borges) regarding this and all of the above. More on this later.

Footnotes

1. For if deconstruction is based on différance, itself “neither a word nor a concept” (”Différance.” Margins of Philosophy, 3), deconstruction cannot possibly be a “method” or a “style” (even if Derrida himself at times provisionally accepts that they are), both of which imply the possibility of applying something that is not. Deconstruction is, at best, a performance, albeit one that erases itself. ↩
2. Of Grammatalogy. ↩
3. Ibid. ↩
4. “The Ends of Man”, Margins of Philosophy. ↩
5. “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, Writing and Difference. ↩
6. Approximately everywhere. ↩
7. “Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, and elsewhere. ↩
8. It is curious, and potentially productive, to note that Derrida at times seems to deconstruct texts that are quite aware of their problematic inscription in a metaphysical tradition. His treatment of Freud (previously cited), and Saussure and Levi-Strauss (in Of Grammatalogy) are prominent examples. ↩