If the ubiquity of LLMs kills the MLA essay, it’ll be worth the price.
I haven’t encountered an English teacher that knows how to teach someone how to make an effective argument or state a compelling case, what they know how to do is strictly adhere to the MLA handbook and spot minor grammatical pet peeves. From high school to university I’ve never had an English teacher call me up to discuss my paper to talk about how I could have more effectively made a point, but I’ve gotten commas written over with semicolons.
This comment completelt encapsulates what is wrong. MLA essays? The format is going to die? You have issues with shitty teachers, where are there problems due to the systems in place, you are alright with AI taking away an important human experience? Like come on. Can we stop using AI and critically think for a bit.
So, first, Yeah I’d be in favor of killing the format itself; the MLA format seems to have two functions: 1. to force tens of thousands of young adults to buy MLA handbooks every semester from college book stores, and 2. to serve as a warning to any reader that the article they’ve found was written by an ENG112 student who didn’t give the first squirt of a monday morning’s piss about it because it was assigned to him more as a barrier for him to dodge than an exercise to strengthen him. Actual scholarship is done in the APA format and we’d be better off if we just taught that.
Second, I reject the notion that writing tedious research papers qualifies as “an important human experience.” Again, a lot of folks are forced to dabble in it similarly to how they’re forced to dabble in mathematical proofs: once or twice in high school and once or twice in college, they’re required to rote memorize something for a couple weeks. I’m rather convinced that a lot of the time taken in school from about 7th grade up is designed to appear academic more than actually be academic.
Third, I’m in the camp that says scrap most of the idea we have of formal academic writing, for multiple reasons. Chiefly, the more of those worthless English teachers we can put back into food service where they belong, the better. Stepping a little bit out of my comedy internet persona a bit, I do believe the idea of “impersonal, dry, boring, jargon-laden, complicated” research papers has gone beyond any practical function it may have had. There is something to be said for using standardized language, minimizing slang and such. To me, that would be a reason to write in something like VoA simplified English rather than Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. I’m also not alone in the idea that scientific concepts and research are getting to the point that text on page isn’t the right tool for conveying it; Jupyter notebooks and other such tools are often better than a stodgy essay.
Fourth, undoing the rigorous formats of “scholarly articles” may deal a blow to junk science. I’ve seen English teachers point to the essay format, presence of citations, presence in journals etc. as how you tell a written work has any merit. In practice this has meant that anyone wanting to publish junk science has an excellent set of instructions on how to make it look genuine. Hell, all you’ve got to do is cite a source that doesn’t exist and you’ve created truth from whole cloth, like that “you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep” thing.
Finally, whether the problem lies in the bureaucracy that creates curricula or individual teachers, I’m in favor of forcing their hands by eliminating the long-form essay as a thing they can reasonably expect students to do on a “here’s this semester’s busywork, undergrad freshman” basis.
I had the same experience, but I recently helped my sister with a homework essay and she had a full page with the exact requirements and how they were graded.
90% of the points were for content, the types of arguments, proper structure and such. Only 10% were for spelling and punctuation.
Meaning she could hand in a complete mess, but as long as her argument was solid and she divided the introduction, arguments and conclusion into paragraphs, she’d still get a 9/10. No grumpy teachers docking half her grade for a few commas.
She gets similar detailed instructions for every subject where I used to struggle with vague assignments like “give a good presentation”. It was so bad sometimes, the teacher let the class grade each other.
If the ubiquity of LLMs kills the MLA essay, it’ll be worth the price.
I haven’t encountered an English teacher that knows how to teach someone how to make an effective argument or state a compelling case, what they know how to do is strictly adhere to the MLA handbook and spot minor grammatical pet peeves. From high school to university I’ve never had an English teacher call me up to discuss my paper to talk about how I could have more effectively made a point, but I’ve gotten commas written over with semicolons.
This comment completelt encapsulates what is wrong. MLA essays? The format is going to die? You have issues with shitty teachers, where are there problems due to the systems in place, you are alright with AI taking away an important human experience? Like come on. Can we stop using AI and critically think for a bit.
So, first, Yeah I’d be in favor of killing the format itself; the MLA format seems to have two functions: 1. to force tens of thousands of young adults to buy MLA handbooks every semester from college book stores, and 2. to serve as a warning to any reader that the article they’ve found was written by an ENG112 student who didn’t give the first squirt of a monday morning’s piss about it because it was assigned to him more as a barrier for him to dodge than an exercise to strengthen him. Actual scholarship is done in the APA format and we’d be better off if we just taught that.
Second, I reject the notion that writing tedious research papers qualifies as “an important human experience.” Again, a lot of folks are forced to dabble in it similarly to how they’re forced to dabble in mathematical proofs: once or twice in high school and once or twice in college, they’re required to rote memorize something for a couple weeks. I’m rather convinced that a lot of the time taken in school from about 7th grade up is designed to appear academic more than actually be academic.
Third, I’m in the camp that says scrap most of the idea we have of formal academic writing, for multiple reasons. Chiefly, the more of those worthless English teachers we can put back into food service where they belong, the better. Stepping a little bit out of my comedy internet persona a bit, I do believe the idea of “impersonal, dry, boring, jargon-laden, complicated” research papers has gone beyond any practical function it may have had. There is something to be said for using standardized language, minimizing slang and such. To me, that would be a reason to write in something like VoA simplified English rather than Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. I’m also not alone in the idea that scientific concepts and research are getting to the point that text on page isn’t the right tool for conveying it; Jupyter notebooks and other such tools are often better than a stodgy essay.
Fourth, undoing the rigorous formats of “scholarly articles” may deal a blow to junk science. I’ve seen English teachers point to the essay format, presence of citations, presence in journals etc. as how you tell a written work has any merit. In practice this has meant that anyone wanting to publish junk science has an excellent set of instructions on how to make it look genuine. Hell, all you’ve got to do is cite a source that doesn’t exist and you’ve created truth from whole cloth, like that “you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep” thing.
Finally, whether the problem lies in the bureaucracy that creates curricula or individual teachers, I’m in favor of forcing their hands by eliminating the long-form essay as a thing they can reasonably expect students to do on a “here’s this semester’s busywork, undergrad freshman” basis.
I had the same experience, but I recently helped my sister with a homework essay and she had a full page with the exact requirements and how they were graded.
90% of the points were for content, the types of arguments, proper structure and such. Only 10% were for spelling and punctuation.
Meaning she could hand in a complete mess, but as long as her argument was solid and she divided the introduction, arguments and conclusion into paragraphs, she’d still get a 9/10. No grumpy teachers docking half her grade for a few commas. She gets similar detailed instructions for every subject where I used to struggle with vague assignments like “give a good presentation”. It was so bad sometimes, the teacher let the class grade each other.
(Note we aren’t American, not even English.)