Anti-MLA Handbook

Dallas Liddle hates the new edition of the MLA Handbook :

To prepare for the new semester I have been studying the altered form of my own professional discourse laid out in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook and feeling something close to despair about where, on its evidence, the scholarly study of language and literature must be headed. Based on this new edition, what does my own beloved discipline of English know and value?

Not nearly what it used to.

Read it all: “Why I Hate the New MLA Handbook” (The Chronicle of Higher Education ).

I have long preferred Chicago style, which seems to me more logical, more readable, and better able to answer tricky questions. MLA8 has one welcome change: the dumb identifiers Print and Web are gone from Works Cited entries. But so are the names of cities of publication. And the ugly abbreviation pp. is back. And in the name of a university press, University and Press are still reduced to U and P . And source materials now come to us in “containers.” A magazine is a container. So is a television series. So is Netflix. So an episode of Stranger Things has two containers. O brave new world.

For sample citations with MLA seventh- and eighth-edition styles, see here and here.

Tenuously related posts
Bad news from the MLA : Leadbelly at the MLA