MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (review)

If the MLA Handbookdid not exist, it or a book like it would have to be written. It provides the nuts and bolts of documentation for research papers in the humanities and combines that with lucid discussion of what a research paper is and how to go about writing one well. Other style guides tell much the same story, of course, but part of what distinguishes the Handbookis its near-perfect pitch. Its explanations and examples are ample but concise. Usually, Joseph Gibaldi knows to finish saying what he has begun and knows when he has said enough that he can stop.

The readership for which the Handbookis primarily written is young – students in high school, college, and university – and hence the tone that, in places, older readers are liable to find condescending if they forget that knowledge about thesis statements or how to navigate an academic library was not necessarily innate in their case either. And few scholars of any age will be so practised in the business of documentation that they would not find the Handbooka convenient source for helping them figure out how to cite an article that was originally published as a chapter in a book but that they read online in a section tucked away in a remote corner of a complicated Web site.

Actually, though, for that, what they might find yet more useful is Turabian (for students) or The Chicago Manual of Style(for publishers and those writing for publication). What Turabian is to the Chicago Manual, the Handbookis to the larger MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. Journals seem to favour MLA style; university presses seem to favour Chicago. The comparison between the MLA guides and the Chicago guides is inevitable, as both are thorough, widely used, and have much in common. The most salient difference between them is in the balance between two complementary aims: Chicago has more in the way of focused instruction in formal matters of style, while MLA's discussion of purpose and process is broader and at the same time more detailed.

In the Handbook, readers are taken by the hand and walked, not driven, through the process of writing a paper. Glancing ahead at all the necessary talk about outlines, organization of sources, and so forth, many are liable to groan and some to panic, and so Gibaldi does well to warn against the assumption that the processes he describes will be appropriate in all cases and to include, early on, a paragraph headed 'An Intellectual Adventure.' There he acknowledges the temptation 'to see doing a paper as a mechanical exercise' and, obviously concerned that those so tempted give the Handbooka chance, uses the word 'excitement' and refers to 'the intellectual challenge of pursuing a question that interests you' (original emphasis). 'Actually, a research paper is an adventure, an intellectual adventure rather like solving a mystery' (4–5).

From there on, though, the book is mostly boot camp for young scholars, whose respect for the drill sergeant should by now be reinforced by this gesture to indicate he's on their side. The opening chapter on how to do research is exhaustive. It is followed by a chapter, hortatory as well as descriptive, on plagiarism – avoid it at all costs, and here's what it is. The message is reinforced by the decision to devote a whole chapter to it. Gibaldi is right that the Internet has made plagiarism easier to commit and, by the same token, at least in some instances, easier to detect. What constitutes plagiarism and what doesn't? Students are often genuinely confused. At one extreme, we might once have copied whole sentences out of encyclopaedias, and at the other we might have cited Eric Foner as our authority for the statement that the Union army won the battle of...