HERE IS THIS ASSIGNMENT
Alright!!!! This is probably the most exciting moment in your entire high school life! In fact, this may be the most exciting moment in your life altogether! Are you ready for it? I want to talk to you about...(wait for it) PROPER ESSAY FORMATTING. Right?!
Whatever. I can't make this exciting, but I don't have to make it important - college and university professors everywhere have already done that for me.
The bottom line is that in addition to the way your essay READS/ARGUES (very important) - the way your essay LOOKS can have a large impact on your final mark. So let's spend some time on this assignment.
Essentially, I want you to learn how to properly format a paper for your college classes. This won't earn you many marks at college, but having a paper that is not properly formatted will often cost you marks.
So, first off, we're going to be talking about "style guides" for this assignment. A style guide is simply a set of rules you must use when formatting your paper. Basically, Universities and Colleges want papers to look the same - no flashy title pages on some, no fluctuating margins on others, no fancy fonts...it should all look the same. That way the content of the paper is the only thing being judged. Make sense?
You may or may not already know that there are multiple "style guides" used by different disciplines at post-secondary school. The two main ones are the Modern Languages Association (MLA), and the American Psychology Association (APA).
I want you to take your already written essay, and format it to fit these two different ways.
All you need for this assignment is:
- an essay you've already written for me - from any grade, on any topic. But it should be relatively recent, and imperfect (don't worry about the last part, they all are imperfect).
- these links - Proper APA Style Guide and Citation
- Proper MLA Style Guide and Citation
