Today’s Plan:
- Attendance
- Emailing Me
- Review Peer Workshop #1 Criteria
- MLA / APA format
- Peer Review
- Homework
Emailing Me
It is the time of the semester when I know many people are stressed and feeling overwhelmed. I’ve gotten a few emails touching on this. I am pretty flexible when it comes to working with students regarding missing work, crunched schedules, etc. Feel free to email me.
However, a few people have been emailing my insignificantwrangler at gmail dot com account. Don’t do this. That account is primarily for students handing in work via Google Drive–and my Google Drive settings send me an email whenever a student shares something with me, responds to a comment I’ve put in their work, and/or in some cases edits a document. It is way too easy for me to lose an email in all that chaos. So, if you want to talk (or just need some moral support), email my UNCO address (or just send the message via Canvas).
Peer Review Workshop #1 Criteria
MLA / APA Format (Other Formats)
Today I want to focus a bit of attention on MLA and APA format. Specifically, I want to highlight both citation format and paper format. We will talk about Works Cited / Reference format in a later class.
Whether we are talking about MLA or APA, I’m looking for a few paper formatting concerns:
- Page Margins
- Line Spacing (and paragraph spacing thanks to Microsoft Word)
- Paragraph Gutters
- Page Numbers / Headings
I’ll also be looking for a few citation concerns:
- In-text citations, quotation marks, and periods (emphasis: dates in APA have to be incorporated into the sentence after the name)
- Block text citations, quotation marks, and periods (any quote over 3-4 lines should be blocked)
You can easily find more information about formatting from the Purdue University Online Writing Lab’s pages on MLA and APA format (or just google a question with OWL MLA or OWL APA).
I want to stress that in terms of the final grade, these things are not as highly weighted as the more substantive concerns we discussed last week: making claims, providing evidence, transitioning into evidence, explicating evidence, and finishing paragraphs making explicit connections between a paragraph’s specific idea and the paper’s larger purpose. However, just about every paper rubric you encounter during your University education is going to address MLA and APA format.
Homework
Continue to revise and write your paper. Remember that a complete draft of the paper is due by Tuesday, April 4th. I will award extra credit to anyone who gets me a complete draft of the paper before that date (the sooner they start rolling in, the sooner I can provide feedback and you can revise).
Checking the syllabus, I see that the original requirement for final papers was 2,500-3,500 words. I thought the final papers were intended to be longer, so I think many of you will be able to reach that word count pretty easily.
