Date: 20 January 2017    

Time: 4:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.    

Venue: Room 110, Block 4

Resource person: Emily Griggs

The Department of English, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) organized a Workshop on ‘MLA Style sheet, 8th edition, on 20 January 2017 for the MPhil students of the Department. The external resource person was Ms. Emily Griggs. She was introduced to the research scholars by Dr. Abhaya N B, Head, Department of English.

Dr. Abhaya M B then outlined the purpose of the workshop in brief by stating that it would help the scholars understand the changes that had been made from the 7th to the latest 8th MLA edition. She said that she personally found the 8th edition to be cleaner and simpler than the 7th. She said that the workshop would be a hands-on and interactive experience to help the scholars in writing citations and that it would also enable them to have a concrete understanding of the difference between bibliography and works cited. She then concluded by saying she hoped it would be a constructive and meaningful session before handing it over to the external resource person.

Ms. Emily Griggs then circulated handouts consisting of the MLA 8th edition Works Cited Template guidelines and a shortened MLA practice template for the scholars, based on her PowerPoint presentation which would enable the scholars to follow her better. She then began the session by talking about the need to move on from the outdated MLA 7th edition format to the newer one as it was impossible for the former one to cope with the newer publication formats like interactive websites, streaming videos, social media, digital music and apps.

She stated that the sleeker 8th edition had gone from more specific to a more generalised approach. According to it, the rigid citation format practised by the older edition is no longer practical. Highlighting the differences between both the editions, she said that the more flexible 8th edition provided multiple ways to cite sources and the inclusion of elements in citations was now optional.

She then proceeded to explain how to cite the author(s) of a source, title of the source and title of the container. The term ‘container’ generated curiosity among the scholars to which she went on to explain that when the source being documented forms a part of a larger whole, the larger whole can be thought of as a container that holds the source, citing EBSCO eBook Collection and GALE CENGAGE Learning as examples of containers.

She then explained how to cite contributors other than the author, version or edition of the source, volume/ issue number, publisher, publication date and location drawing the scholars’ attention to the changes in punctuation which had been incorporated into the latest edition. She also gave out handy tips to be followed while citing from websites, for instance, saying that if there is a publication date for the website, then it isn’t necessary to mention the date of access, or if a website’s publisher is essentially the same as its title, (i.e. YouTube is published by YouTube), then one can skip the publisher and include the title only.

She then told the scholars to practice citing sources using the practice template given. Once this was done she left the session open to the scholars’ queries, satisfactorily answering each of them. The session was then concluded with a thank you speech given by Ms. Salome Inamdar on behalf of the M.Phil scholars.

 Report written by – MPhil Scholar Reema L. Kotian