MLA guidelines for citing sources are the main citing style for English composition. For most MLA citations the author, source title, publisher, and publication year must be provided. If the source was considered multivolume work the volume number and pages should be included to indicate the section the source belongs to. For in-text citations, all that was used was the author and the page number the quote was from. An example would be in my Project Three essay, where there would be the quote and the in-text citation afterward: ““Immediately the girl became physically sick. Faint, nauseous, and so ill she couldn’t get out of bed. It was if her parents had amputated a limb. And in a way they had. Our creations are now inseparable from us. Our identity with technology runs deep, to our core.”(Kelley 1)” MLA wasn’t hard when we had resources from class to aid us in the building of the citations.
Local revisions were something that I wasn’t really worried about. There were just small sentence-level errors like word choice, run-on and choppy sentences, and the flow of the paper. It wasn’t the biggest thing I had to worry about when writing up until the revision process and peer review. In order to fix word choice problems, I would use my word finder to see which words were being overused and then look up synonyms for them; this was to help my paper sound less repetitive. Peer review helped with getting feedback on my run-on and choppy sentences, and the flow of my essay. My peers could tell me from the reader’s point of view which sentences could use work, and then I could go back in and fix it. One example was with the flow of my quote introduction, my peer had recommended adjusting my quote introduction because the delivery was a bit off to them. It went from, “In addition, Kevin Kelley recounts a story of an acquaintance’s daughter who acted the same” to “In addition, Kevin Kelley recounts a story of an acquaintance’s daughter who acted the same when her parents took away her cellphone”. The aid from my peers allowed me to better revise and strengthen my arguments with just some small sentence-level tweaks. While local revision and MLA may not have been the most important to begin with in my essay writing, it was definitely one of the larger factors in my writing to help better reinforce my arguments.
