Posts Tagged ‘Popular’

MLA – An Increasingly Popular Research Paper Format

February 27th, 2010

Many students, school teachers, and professors are familiar with the MLA (Modern Language Association) research paper style. The MLA format has been around since 1985. The MLA style is most commonly used in North American schools and Universities, but the MLA research paper style is also popular in other parts of the world like in Europe. The style is most often used in English-speaking countries.

The Modern Language Association produces the research format guidelines to have a consistent format for scholarly publishing. We know that students, teachers, and professors use the format; surprisingly, professional writers and editors also use the basic rules of the publication when creating research papers. MLA is not just a format for research papers, but it also is a guide for studying modern languages, other cultures, and the media. MLA is commonly used across disciplines; for instances, those studying humanities, literature, and even art must understand the fundamentals of the MLA style.

Within the last decade, the latest Modern Language Association guidebook has gotten extremely popular in the United States and abroad. We have known about the MLA style in North America for several years; however, in countries like Taiwan, Japan, India, Brazil, and China, the guide continues to increase in popularity. In fact, the MLA has become the most popular research format in the world. The guidelines are not just used for research articles by schools and universities, but they are also used in magazines, newspapers, and newsletters.

The latest release of the MLA guidelines does the same thing as the previous release of the book, by providing detailed rules concerning proper margins and fonts, along with how to deal with references to avoid plagiarism. How strictly there rules are followed depends on the research publication, teacher, professor, or editor that the research paper is being submitted to. There also might be abnormal characteristics of the research article that needs to be taken into consideration.

If you are currently writing a paper, I recommend looking at a MLA research paper example and try to format your own paper in the exact same way. Keep in mind, the most important aspect of the MLA style, is to cite references both in-text and at the end of the article in a “Works Cited” section. If you make proper MLA citations, you will avoid getting into trouble for plagiarism with your teacher, professor, or editor. The formatting of this section is tricky, look at an example for help.

Why Books Will Always be Popular

January 12th, 2010

Technology continues to bring changes to our lives and many objects that people once placed great value in are being consigned to history. This has led people to speculate that the traditional type of book will be replaced by an electronic version; they point to the record industry as evidence to what will happen to books. Other people feel certain that the format of the book will also be completely revised because people no longer have the attention span to be wading through long narrative; they want something short and zappy. One other claim is that the future type of book will not be a static entity, but instead something that is constantly evolving with readers being able to interact with the text and the author constantly changing it to keep it up to date. These arguments do make a lot of sense, but here is why I feel certain that in some ways they are wrong; are at least not completely correct.

People frequently compare the traditional paper book to the record industry. To me this does not seem like a fair comparison because they are different in many ways. For one thing the book has been around a lot longer than recorded music. Humans have been enjoying books for many centuries while recorded sound is only just only been popular for over a hundred years or so. Recorded music has evolved rapidly during its history with different types of vinyl records leading to cassettes which developed to CDs and eventually to MP3s. People did become fond of different formats, but they were still having the same sort of listening experience only that it came with improvements. This is different than books because most readers claim that every attempt to develop an electronic reading device has always took away from the experience; people read electronic books for connivance and not because they offer a better way of reading. The big changes that have occurred with music have not happened with books and they don’t really seem like to. The electronic book will become more popular, but it is unlikely to replace paper for many more years.

The next argument is that people want something much shorter that the traditional 60,000 to 120,000 word book. The reality is that there have always been some people who liked the short story over long narration. These days less people choose short stories and people now expect books to be longer; the average word count for a book was once about 60,000 but nowadays people feel shortchanged if it is anything less than 100,000.

The idea of the interactive book becoming more popular probably does have a lot of truth in it. New technology like Google Wave might herald some really exciting times ahead with readers being able to interact more with the story. These types of new technology will likely bring many new enjoyable ways of doing things, but they will likely just be a different way of reading rather than replacing the traditional book.