I was both surprised and, in a sick sense, happy to see myself signed up for the “lay/lie” mini-lesson because that issue causes a lot of trouble for me. I don’t like Spell-check or its green and whimsical pal Grammar-check and I fight them both every sentence of every paper I write (just kidding, it’s only a few sentences I have to fight them). But when it comes to the lay/lie problem, I keep my mouth shut and let Microsoft Word do the work. I always mix those up.
It’s not a topic that I’m easily familiar with to focus on the teaching of grammar but it will also help me learn and internalize the subtle rules governing these words.
Our exercises with the newspapers are interesting and I’m seeing the theme develop in Barbara’s teaching of using modern, practical materials to work through the lessons as opposed to teaching them outright. Even for grammar lessons that I feel I already have a good grasp on, it is still engaging to do the activities.
This last installment of grammar classes held less obstacles for me and so I haven’t uncovered any big bad grammar issues that I might have but for the whole class, I’m finding that I do have my quirks and issues with grammar more and more as we move along (while correcting them, of course). They were issues that fell into the background and have been overlooked for too long. I think some of my writing has smoothed out and I have a better conscious understanding of grammar that helps solidify my academic writings.
Question!: I have always cited, in MLA format, with my sentence and then the short parenthetical citation. So I’ll have my sentence go “blah blah blah in the blah century.” (Blah pg. blah) Recently I’ve seen a lot of people keeping the parenthetical citation within the sentence and putting the period outside the last parentheses as if the citation was a short blurb within the sentence. Which one, if not both, of these options is correct?
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Hey,
ReplyDeleteI'm not 100% but I think you have been doing it wrong. I have learned that you should end the quote before you make the parenthetical citation and put the period after that. I double checked with A Writer’s Resource and that’s what I understand from it. So you would have, "cheese is the greatest thing on earth"(James 23).
The standard MLA format is as Katie said, except that there should be a space between the quotation symbol and the parenthetical, reading "...greatest thing on earth" (James 23). Also, The most common parenthetical discrepency is putting a comma in there, as in (James, 23). I have had professors tell me this was the "old way" of parentheticalizing, but now it's expected to leave the comma out. It looks like parentheticals are trending in the same way that Barbara has said elements of general grammar and punctuation are trending: "when in doubt, leave it out!"
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