Academic Publishing Just Got Easier
As an English major, I spent a lot of time writing according to MLA format. It’s fairly straightforward, but difficult to implement on WordPress. There is simply no easy way to add a “Works Cited” section to a blog post or page. Everything else is largely a matter of formatting that is easily available in the visual editor.
My original solution was to create a child theme with the styles I needed and then apply them via the text editor. It worked for me, but I realized that most academic authors (especially in the liberal arts) would rather write papers than write HTML. So I wrote this plugin to make it easy for everyone to do this.
This plugin makes it easy to cite books, journal articles, and magazine articles. Here’s an example of a book citation:
Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. Print.
Here’s an example of a journal article:
Works Cited
Brannon, Lil, Jennifer Pooler Courtney, et al. “The Five-Paragraph Essay and the Deficit Model of Instruction.” English Journal. 98.2 (2008): 16-21. Web. Accessed through the ProQuest Research Library.
Note that you can have multiple authors. You can also add a note to the end of the citation. (And you can use the visual editor to add italics or bold, if you need to.)
Here’s an example of a magazine article:
Works Cited
Newman, Cathy. “Masks that Make Magic.” National Geographic. April 2012: 66-77. Print.
Photographs by Phyllis Galembo. The article includes photographs from Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria.
Here we have added a note as a separate paragraph to the end of the citation.
And of course, these can all go together in the same “Works Cited” section:
Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. We Should All Be Feminists. New York: Anchor Books, 2012. Print.
Brannon, Lil, Jennifer Pooler Courtney, et al. “The Five-Paragraph Essay and the Deficit Model of Instruction.” English Journal. 98.2 (2008): 16-21. Web. Accessed through the ProQuest Research Library.
Newman, Cathy. “Masks that Make Magic.” National Geographic. April 2012: 66-77. Print.
Photographs by Phyllis Galembo. The article includes photographs from Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria.
To make this plugin even handier, I include the option to highlight text in an article, and to easily make text smaller, which you sometimes need.
Like it? Go ahead and get a copy from the WordPress plugin repository. Need documentation? It’s on my wiki.