Today I visited UNR’s Youth Writing Program. These young students were full of smart, inventive lines and made some remarkable collaborative poems.

Some folks (thanks, Matt!) asked for the slides from my presentation. You can see them at the link below.

UNR youth writing program

To mark the release of the 8th edition of the MLA handbook, when I introduce MLA formatting in comp class, we’re going to have a mini-discussion with a throwback to the 2nd edition. The new edition is streamlined based on basic principles. We’ll be looking for those in the earlier edition.

But we’ll also be thinking about technological evolution and generational culture shock. In the 1980s, students were using the card catalog to locate books in the library.

Students typed their papers on typewriters, which meant titles were underlined rather than italicized.

This also meant that to make corrections to a paper a student would use a caret above a line of text. Otherwise, the paper would have to be re-typed. There’s a unicorn at the top of the page here to signal the miracle paper without any typing errors.