MLA Citations: Your attention to detail establishes your credibility

After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading.

I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat details. Some of the details are admittedly persnickety, but when one entry puts parentheses around the date, and the entry right after it doesn’t, surely that’s a cue that they can’t both be right.

I’m putting time in on this now so that when students submit their drafts later in the term, I won’t feel obligated to explain the citation errors in detail (when I should instead be focusing on their ideas).

If they don’t want to learn the lessons that will earn them full points on the “MLA Format” part of the rubric, I can’t force them.