My MLA formatting process has been something I’ve really had to work hard on this year from my final draft of my first paper to the final draft of my second paper. In my first paper, I found that a good portion of the comments for improvement that I received were based on my works cited page. I’m not sure how much that was worth, but I knew it could have made a difference in my grade and was something that needed to be worked on. These were simple mistakes such as adding quotations around the titles of the readings and punctuating properly. The other mistake I made a bit more complicated to improve was the magazine title that was left out in my first paper. However, during my second paper, I ensured that I did additional research on each one of the papers and I found new information on them that weren’t on the initial documents we used during class like the magazine and edition. This helped me to getting a far better works cited which lead to a better grade.

For the most part, my sentence-level error was less significant than that of my MLA works cited page. The only big improvement I found myself making from my first paper to my second paper was that I went more in depth with introducing my sources. For example, in my first paper, I wrote a quote by Geary and wrote at the end “noted by Geary” rather than “noted by Geary in his TED Talk “See Through Word”. Even though I’m citing these authors at the end, I learned that it’s still significant to cite them the first time introducing them as well. In my second paper, I improvised on this by fully introducing who the author is and what they wrote. For example, when I introduced Yo-Yo Ma, I wrote “Cellist and songwriter Yo-Yo Ma in his article “Necessary Edges” claims that we need to “add the empathetic reasoning of the arts into the mix – STEAM” which was something I made sure to do with any source from then on out. These were by biggest sentence-level corrections besides simply a comma or a “s”