MLA italics

cwerthschulte
Hello,

I have tried to tweak the current MLA style so that it italicizes the title of a book or journal rather than underlining it. Yet when I create a bibliography, the title now is simply not displayed leaving me with something like this:

Modern Language Association (italic)
(Gelder)

Gelder, Ken, ed. London, New York: Routledge, 2005.

rather than:

Modern Language Association (italic)
(Gelder)

Gelder, Ken, ed. The Subculture Reader. London, New York: Routledge, 2005.

I've uploaded the csl-file here.
http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Christian.Werthschulte/mla_italic.csl

I'll happily make it available, if somebody might be so kind as to point me towards the mistake.

Thanks and all the best,
CW
  • Tjowens
    One of our devs tweaked your style and made it available on the styles page. Give it a try. http://www.zotero.org/styles
  • bdarcus
    Using underlines for formatting is archaic, and I could have sworn that the MLA guide has finally recognized this. Alas, it seems not.

    Grumble, grumble ...
  • erazlogo
    edited April 3, 2008
    Bruce--
    It may make sense for you as the CSL lead to write something like an open letter to major style guide organizations--MLA, BlueBook, Chicago--asking to make their standards more, well, standard and reasonable--i.e. abolish archaic Latin abbreviations, small caps, underline, etc. In the Chronicle of Higher Ed maybe?
  • bdarcus
    Good idea Elena.
  • samuelas
    From what I can tell, the new, just released MLA third edition enforces the use of italics rather than underlining (and one assumes the examples will use Times rather than Courier) in order to finally recognize what nearly everyone already does anyway: "Following common practice, the MLA Style Manual now assumes the use of italic type in manuscripts for text meant to be italicized in publication."

    I haven't seen the book itself, but here's the website blurb:

    http://www.mla.org/style/handbook_faq/mlastyle_thirdedition
  • dstillman
    Would it make sense to offer the italics style as, say, mla-3 and make it the default in new installs? Current installs (and current documents) would have the old MLA style as well. New installs would have to install the old MLA style from the styles page.
  • samuelas
    My sense (as someone from an MLA field) is that yes, most people use italics. You might wait to see exactly what the 3rd ed. demands, however. For example--medium of publication will be a new field for the works cited ref.
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