April 4th

The reading was very interesting and sparked my thought process. The citation that was the most meaningful to me was “This consistency allows readers to become accustomed to certain conven­tions and increases readability. When a professor reviews multiple pa­pers formatted in the same way, for example, she can easily find the author’s name and class section on all of the papers (Klein & Shackelford 343).” This quote was so important to me because readability is very important. When you write something it needs to be easy to follow so people will want to read your writing.  Consistency is also very important because when things are not consistent you may not know what to expect. When you know what to expect things flow and they make more sense and increase readability. If I were to read something g and it was out of order and didn’t make sense I would not want to read it because I wouldn’t understand the concept. Understanding the concept is very important and that goes along with the wringing of the piece.

Many teachers have their own style of how they want you to write a paper and how they want you to submit a paper. For example I have a teacher that doesn’t want a title, just your name and start answering the question. I also have a teacher that they want pages to be printed double sided and double spaced. Other teachers want APA style or MLA. This allows the teacher to have consistency in what they are going to read. For example if they are reading a MLA paper and want to check your citation they could go directly to where your source was and get more information. With my teacher that only wants your name and answer the question this saves my teacher time because he doesn’t want a lot of unnecessary things on the page. This gives the teacher consistency. If a teacher asks for something specific and they can’t find it then confusion comes along. Having methods makes reading easier and it provides clarification.

            I defiantly agree with both writers. We definitely should think about design in all texts. I agree with this because all writing has a purpose and in order to reach your purpose you need to think about your text in all angles. You also need to think about who will be reading your writing and how that will affect them. Also there are certain designs that are specific for certain texts and if you do not follow the design you will not have consistency across that genre. For example if you are supposed to write a paper in APA and you use not citations or you do not cite the professor may not take your argument serious and you did not follow directions so you may still receive a bad grade.

MLA creates a style of writing. It allows for consistency and readability. This also allows the reader to find more information about the topic you wrote about and to see how other scholars felt about the argument. Not only MLA but all styles of writing provide structure for the reader.  MLA is interesting because in my major APA is prominent and MLA makes me feel as if I am wringing high school papers because that is the format that I used in high school. Because of my major I defiantly prefer APA, because I know more about the writing structure.