It’s the same old thing again. An essay is due for your next class, but what format does the professor want?

Do they want MLA? What about APA? Does anyone even use that thing called Chicago Style anymore?

Every student has seen this dilemma, and it varies from department to department, from professor to professor. Although, English professor Catherine Fraga said, professors within the same department using different formats is just, well, nuts.

“Usually a department goes one way or the other, MLA or APA,” she said.

Why use different formats anyway? What’s the difference?

In MLA formatting, citations done within the text of a paper are placed at the end of the sentence in the form of an author’s name and page number, or just a page number. In APA, citations can come in the middle of a sentence when need be. Chicago Style relies heavily on a bibliography rather than in-text citations. Then there is CBE, one of the formatting styles that can be found in writing handbooks but something that most students haven’t even heard of. While MLA and APA both have page number, year, or author citations in the text itself, CBE uses superscript numbers to direct readers to references. This is similar to endnotes or footnotes.

“It gives me a headache,” Fraga said.

General education classes, span various departments and disciplines, so the bane of a student’s existence is when it comes to paper formatting.

In any given semester, a student could have professors asking for various styles of formatting depending on the class. So a student could be writing papers in up to four different formats during the semester.

Often, there are errors in the formatting of those papers. For those who are supposed to be using MLA, footnotes pop up even though they are not supposed to be used. Title pages are given when most papers are not supposed to be submitted with one. However, probably the most common mistakes are made in the in-text citations. Is an author’s name included in that citation? What about the date, is that included, too? Maybe that was just in APA.

For those students writing in APA, there are the levels of a paper to consider. The different levels of importance within a paper determine how that section is supposed to be formatted. There is also the abstract at the beginning of the paper to worry about.

The consensus seems to be that the purpose of the paper determines the format to be used. While an argumentative essay would be easier if MLA is used, a technical research paper might be easier if APA is used.

However, professors should consider that students do have other papers to write and try to be as consistent in their formatting choices for their papers.

Contact Jenna Hughes at [email protected]