APA or MLA?That is the question

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To be honest, at the beginning I felt a little bit confused about this topic (and I’m sorry, I know that it's useful but I found it quite boring). Anyway, I learned that MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) show two different ways to cite sources. These two links give many detailed suggestions, from structure to the information you have to report. Let’s see them in short.

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MLA style

This is commonly used for humanities. Here you can use in-text citations putting references in brackets. This style gives you precise suggestions about the elements you have to quote and the way you have to do it. In this way you can see immediately the source for citations and you don’t waste time looking for notes in another place. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that if there are many different citations, the piece of writing presents lots of brackets and it becomes less fluent and easy to read and follow (for this reason, if you choose it, it is suggested to keep references brief). Talking about types, it prefers using underlining instead of italics in order to point it out.

APA style

You have to follow many different instructions for every kind of source and every aspect of quotation. It uses the year of publication of the source text (so you can see immediately if the source is recent, which is very important if you think that APA citation is commonly used for science). Moreover, APA style requires an abstract in order to introduce and summarize the object of your research.

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I didn't use one specific style in my BA thesis but, if I had to choose the most similar one, I would refer to APA style.

On the article I chose

Does it follow the hourglass structure?
Yes, it does. As you can read in the abstract, the article is structured in this way:

• at the beginning there is a general presentation of ideas and goals,
• in the middle the writer goes on giving examples for her thesis through three case studies, and
• finally she draws her conclusions, which are substantially the same ideas she introduced before, in this way she puts together and summarize thesis and their demonstration.

Is there a logical flow of ideas?Is the text cohesive?
I decided to put these questions together because they are strongly related, since cohesion is made possible by the logical flow and, vice versa, the exposition is made more fluent thanks to cohesive elements. Moreover, she resorts to metalanguage, too. The most evident example is given in the abstract:

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In this article the author sets out to illustrate some of the strategies which Italian translators and publishers adopted, or were forced to adopt, to ensure that their texts passed muster under Fascism.[...] The author proceeds to survey the mechanisms that were put in place to vet books [...]. It is argued that the apparatus of the State was only partially successful at monitoring the content of works of literature. This historical contextualisation, drawing on archival and published material, is followed by a number of case-studies, first of three novels by John Steinbeck, and then of Americana, a famous anthology of American literature published during the Second World War. In her conclusion, the author draws attention to the failure of the regime to implement a watertight policy on translation, despite its desire to influence the way readers interpreted books.

Is the writing clear or complex?
The writing is very clear thanks to the fact that the topic is strongly related to the social aspect of communication. For this reason, I cannot provide examples for it because actually there aren’t technical words (so I can say that my example is that I cannot give examples for it ;)

Who is the text’s assumed audience? What indication of this do you have?

The text is easily comprehensible for anyone. Anyway, it doesn't dwell on fascism but it implies that readers still know enough information about it.

Do you think a blog post should follow some or any of these points?

In my opinion its structure should depend on its contents. Sometimes there is no need to write an introduction or a conclusion (for example when you write a piece of story), but I think that every text should be cohesive and coherent.

Image taken from darkchild69, flickr

On plagiarism

What can be considered plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a delicate matter which can regard everybody, not necessarily students. I have to admit that its concept is not very clear to me. I think that no one in the world is not influenced by other ideas or creations: from painters who belong to the same artistic movement, to poets who use the same sytle of writing being inspired by the same poet, to musicians which grew up listening their favourite band. The line of demarcation between influence and plagiarism is not so clear-cut. For this reason, I consider plagiarism the intention to misappropriate other's work pretending that it is your own work.

Types of plagiarism

There are many ways to do it:

• using the common "copy and paste", where you reproduce the entire work or a part of it as it is, without changing a word;
• paraphrasing contents, where you change structure and use synonyms, without moving away from the original;
• using the same identical bibliography which someone used once to write his paper;

What we can do to avoid it

Here there are some suggestions:

• try to think with your own head, even if it takes time;
• quote the original text, adding the source;
• express your opinion in order to talk about other's ideas adding something personal;
• if you want to share another person's opinions or studies with your readers, you can summarize them citing the author;

When YOU are the victim

Of course, if there are lots of people who commit plagiarism, there are also lots of people who undergo it. It must be very difficult to find out, there are so many books, so many people, so many ideas!Anyway, concerning online plagiarism (which is something that regard us), I found an interesting blog post, where the author talked about a software called FairShare, which is able to discover who copies your posts. Interesting, isn't it?:)

This image was taken from udronotto, flickr, I suggest you to see the others!

Putting reliability checklist into test

I have to admit that it wasn't easy. When I succeeded in finding something interesting, I couldn't read it because I had to subscribe to a website or purchase the whole work to do it. Sometimes, I could save it but it was protected by copyright so I couldn't copy nor print it. Fortunately, I used google scholar, which helped me to restrict the search and finally I got it!Hurrah!

The article that drew my attention was entitled Foreign Literature in Fascist Italy: Circulation and Censorship. I went on analyzing it and I find it reliable because it supplied the following information:

• who is the researcher: Jane Dunnett, from the University of London;
• what is the theoretical framework: it is described in the abstract. The article has an introduction, where she describes the social and political context of Italy in the 1930s and its censorship mechanisms, then she presents some case-studies and finally she draws her conclusions
• goal of the research: she wants to survey the strategies used by Italian translators in order to pass fascist censorship;
• place and date of the research: it was carried out in Italy in spring 2000, as you can read in the final notes;
• kind of study: it is quantitative, this is a survey on the base of documents taken from government and publishers' archives, especially as regards the correspondence between editors and translators;
• conclusions: the strategies analyzed proved to be useful to import and spread foreign ideas;
• reservations: they were related to the main features of a dictatorship, like omission and disappearance of important documents.

Image taken from IsaacMao, flickr

Social bookmarking II. The revenge

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I took a look at my peers' choices and these were the most interesting websites to me:

Grammar Girl (suggested by Giorgia), because it can be useful to resolve some doubts about the use of synonyms , punctuation, pronunciation and so on. I found some of the topics which had drawn my attention before, like writing with slang, sentence length and the most important one: Does grammar really matter? :)

Volunteer Work (suggested by Valentina), because it's something that I have always wanted to do. Two years ago I spent one year doing the civil service and I remember that there was the possibility to be involved in foreign projects. Here again, you can choose your destination and look not only for volunteer, but also for studying and teaching abroad, doing internships, and joining adventure travel programs.