Suppress title (MLA)

Motley
Hi,

MLA requires us to occasionally omit the title as well as the author, if these are included in the text of the sentence (as per 6.3 of the style guide: "Readability". However, zotero/the zotero MLA style only allows us to omit the author. Is there a way to suppress the title as well? Note, this is only the case when there is more than one title by the same author cited in the text, as if there's only one it omits the title anyway.

E.g. Zotero gives me this when I add a citation (and suppress the author):

In his _Autobiography_, Benjamin Franklin states that he prepared a list of thirteen values (_Autobiography_ 135-137).

Whereas, the style guide would give this as the correct citation:

In his _Autobiography_, Benjamin Franklin states that he prepared a list of thirteen values (135-137).

I've done my best to find the answer independently; do any of you have any advice?

Best,
Richard
  • adamsmith
    can't be done with current Zotero (other than editing the citation manually) - I think this is probably sufficiently rare so that that's OK.
  • Motley
    Thanks Adam. I find it's quite common for me. Usually occurs at least once in an article, and several times in a longer text, butI accept your point that the easiest solution might be manual editing. Cheers.
  • adamsmith
    The problem is that you'd need both possibilities - i.e. leaving out the author _and_ leaving out author and short title.
    That means we wouldn't just have to add this to the code (which itself is probably a bit messy but possible), but it would also require an extra option in the Word Processor Plugin, which I don't think makes sense for a feature that is almost entirely restricted to one singe citation style.
  • Motley
    Fair enough.
  • derekgingrich
    edited July 28, 2018
    I just want to throw my support for keeping this feature in mind. It may be unique to MLA, but it is very, very common in MLA writing. And even more so in MLA 8.

    Sorry for the necromancy.
  • iswaryaval
    This is true. I second derekgingrich here. This is extremely common in MLA, both when the title is spelt out in the text and for repeat citations of the same source. If there is some way of incorporating this feature in the next update of the MLA style's code, maybe, that might help? Just putting this out here for the notice of the devs who might do a roundup of feature requests sometime.
  • adamsmith
    Same status I'm afraid, I just don't see this happening. As I say above, this would require a separate button in the word processor add-on to be used for a single style.

    You can obviously just put write out the page numbers in the text manually, which is what I'd recommend doing.
  • iswaryaval
    Ah, thanks. I get it. Thanks for that suggestion as a workaround.

    Cheers!
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