Bookends and MLA

[kjmatthews]

Having had the opportunity to use Bookends/Mellel on a long MLA document for the first time in a while, I have identified a few areas where Bookends falls a little short of my needs, which I imagine extend to the rest of the MLA crowd:

1. I once told Jon that two consecutive quotes from the same book and the same page need only be cited the first time, so currently these quotes will be cited in text the first time as ([citation material]), and the second time as (). This information was WRONG. It in fact only needs to be cited the LAST time, and only when the consecutive quotes are within the same paragraph. My suspicion is that Bookends is not designed to recognize paragraph breaks or to "remember" the previous citation well enough to go back and delete it if it matches the current citation exactly. Consider this a feature request for the long-term future.

2. When a citation is marked to not be included in the final document, it should not be taken into account when formatting the next consecutive citation. That is, if I have a document with three citations like so:
i. "Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude@104"
ii. "Faulkner As I Lay Dying@78" — marked as excluded from the final document
iii. "Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude@225"
the resulting textual citations should be (Márquez 104) and (225). Currently Bookends reads the intervening "Faulkner" and returns (Márquez 225) for the third citation.

3. I'm not certain if this is a Mellel or Bookends issue (I always do have trouble separating): sometimes I wish to edit what Bookends determines to be the "final citation" e.g. for the sake of clarity. With Mellel's new "Live Bibliography" feature, each time a new citation is added and Bookends scans the document, any alterations to final citations revert back to their original form. Is there any way to prevent this from happening?

[Jon]

1. You're right, Bookends doesn't know paragraph/section boundaries or parse the non-citation text (in Mellel's case it doesn't even see the text, Mellel only passes Bookends the citations). This is a good thing. The reason I haven't spent a lot of time figuring out how to suppress the second, empty, () is because this is trivial for you to avoid. Simply don't site the same reference twice in a row in a short span (where MLA would ignore it anyway). The user is the intelligence here and understands context, Bookends does not.

2. That's true. Working around this rare case would not be trivial. I'm sure you have your reasons, but I think it would be pretty rare to hide a citation in this manner (and one with cited pages at that).

3. That's a Mellel issue, not Bookends. The answer is -- I don't know. Mellel would have to keep track of manually altered final citations and then leave them untouched when another scan was done. Sounds like #1 to me, a lot of work for a uncommon issue that's easy to avoid (make your final edit before submission, or figure out how to get Bookends to make citation as you like it the first time). But this would be something to ask the Redlers about.

Jon
Sonny Software

[kjmatthews]

Jon,

That's all perfectly reasonable. In any case, you can remove the code that generates the empty () and replace it with the page number —as though it were a regular quotation from the same book as the previous citation— in future versions, if you like. Both are technically incorrect, but the latter makes for less correcting work for the user.

[Jon]

It took a fair amount of work to get that to work (across all word processors). It would now take more work (and more likely to cause inadvertent bugs) to remove it than to leave it.

Jon
Sonny Software

[kjmatthews]

In that case, I apologize profusely for the mistake. I am very careful about these things, and corroborate everything with the handbook. I have no idea how my error slipped through.

[musashi023]

Hello,
I add my question to the thread as it is related to MLA. I have a question about referencing the years (beginning and end) of serial publications spanning various years (ex. a series of comics). In Bookends I could not insert "2003-2006" in the "year" entry. Or "2003-", as the reference in MLA only displays 2003. I would like to know if there's a solution to the problem.

What I would like to have is, for example:

Author. Title of the series. 12 vols. City: Publisher, 2003-2006.

Alternatively, if there are MLA formatting dispositions prescribing that only the final year must be specified, please let me know.

Thanks.

[Jon]

In the format, "use year-only for date" is checked. Uncheck it and Bookends will output whatever you enter in the date field.

Alternatively, you can leave it as is and add a comma at the end of the date -- Bookends will then output this particular date field the way it was entered. Like this

2003-2006,

Jon
Sonny Software

[musashi023]

Done! Thank you very much!