The term “documentation” tends to elicit the same response as the term “grammar.” Students who have been asked to complete exercises in documentation since middle school sometimes think of documentation as nothing but a set of arbitrary rules enforced by people with a petty delight in finding misplaced commas. Yes, documentation does require attention to detail, and yes, those details are written down in reference guides that don’t make great bedtime reading, but they are no more taxing than the rules that govern, for example, behavior at the dinner table: Is it okay to cross chopsticks? What about licking them? In which settings is it unsophisticated to split the bill? And is your own sense of whether something really matters the only sense that counts, or do you have obligations to meet others’ expectations?

As with many somewhat demanding tasks, learning some of the philosophy and background behind documentation gives more meaning to the “rules.”

“MLA,” for example, stands for Modern Language Association. This is a professional organization for scholars of language and literature, broadly conceived; they hold conventions, fund and award scholarships, provide a network, and support scholars. The MLA, like many other academic organizations, also publishes a scholarly journal and has done so for decades. In years before personal computers were common, the editors of this journal required typed submissions for publication to follow a common formatting template.

Professors who were following this format to write their own work recognized the value of having some standard of uniform appearance, an easily understood set of abbreviations (“vol.” for “volume,” “3.1.45-47” to signal lines forty-five to forty-seven of the first scene of the third act of a play), and attention to the same elements of the source material (the difference between the author and the translator of a work; the publisher of a text; the date of publication). They started asking their students to follow the same format when they typed essays for class projects.

Fast forward to now, and we have a set of guidelines for how the first page of an essay should look, what margins and font are appropriate, and what information a Works Cited entry for a blog post should contain. Not all humanities instructors use MLA, and you should always follow their individual style preferences, but the ultimate goal for MLA formatting and citation standards is to provide everyone with a common template to draw from.

While MLA standards may feel like unbreakable rules when you’re wondering whether the period goes before or after the parentheses, it’s helpful to remember that they were created to serve a common need, with your interests in mind. Here’s 2016 MLA Executive Director Rosemary Feal on the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (which deserves a feather boa and some love):

I am especially pleased to present the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook, because it it embodies so many of the values that define the association: a commitment to sharing ideas, a belief in scholarship as the work of a broad community, and a recognition that, while methods and media may change, basic principles of research stay the same. Designed in consultation with students, teachers, and researchers, this edition gives users more freedom to create references to fit their audiences. The recommendations continue to represent the consensus of teachers and scholars but offer a greater flexibility that will better accommodate new media and new ways of doing research.^[1]

Here, too, is Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the Director of Scholarly Communication for the MLA, on what she sees as the philosophy of the eighth edition:

With the eighth edition, we shift our focus from a prescriptive list of formats [how do you cite an article? a tweet? a YouTube video] to the overarching purpose of source documentation: enabling readers to participate fully in the conversations between readers and their sources. … We hope that this reorientation will convey what we believe to be the most important aspect of academic writing: its engagement with the reader, which obliges the author to ensure that the reader has all the information necessary to understand the text at hand without being distracted from it by the citations.”^[2]

Viewed this way, as expressed by people who want to help and not hamper students, accurate documentation is very much in line with INTD 105’s emphasis on academic writing as a conversation between scholars. We all assess information based on where it comes from; I assess the statement that “my house mate is terrible” differently when it comes from a trusted friend than when it comes from someone whose judgment I have no reason to value. Documentation clarifies the source of academic comments, lets your readers assess and follow up with the source if they’d like to, and gives you a standardized form in which to communicate that important information.