The Format Police

If you have been following the Reformed blog scene this week you've by now seen the Slate article about the angry English major condemning those who, heaven forbid, put two spaces between sentences so as to emphasize the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. And so Mr. IHaveNothingWorthwhileToWriteAbout...this is my counter-rant to you.

I remember getting a completely worthless book in middle school written by the Modern Language Association. The 'MLA Handbook' was 300 or so pages of their absolute crap about how every minute detail of your page should be formatted. Much of my middle school and early high school English/grammar classes focused on this bible for a dude with half a ball and an intense case of OCD. It was near this time when I really began to dislike the subject. I really enjoy reading and writing...strange for a guy with an engineering degree, I know. But my sweater-vest wearing, blood sucking, feminist, neat-freak teacher made me want nothing to do with either topic. Her emphasis on format over content was definitely to blame.

I do want to be clear that I'm all for teaching grammar. It is really nice to talk to or read an email from someone who understands past, present, & future tense, or knows the difference between a noun and a verb, or (at least in my line of work) doesn't speak Chinese to you. However, I think it is an enormous waste of time to concern ourselves with spending years of schooling memorizing the MLA (or APA) format for citing an encyclopedia article - which will likely change when this cult of an organization decides to sell a new edition. It is bad enough that someone thinks that a printed encyclopedia has much value to begin with...but to have students memorize and be tested on where to underline, what to italicize, where to place periods, and what order to put all of the necessary information is an utter waste of time.
As the author of 3 published academic papers and a 250 page masters thesis (with more citations than I care to remember), I can say for certain that no one actually gives a rip what format your citations are in, let alone where your figures are located in relation to the margin, and definitely not how many spaces you left between your sentences. While I'm on the topic of citations, I have to ask: Does anyone actually format these things without using easybib.com or endNote? To point out how absolutely worthless teaching students to write strictly according to the MLA format, do the following: take 10 books off of your shelf (preferably by different authors) - do more than 2 of them share the exact same format? Just to confirm my suspicion, I checked around 30 books…no 2 have exactly the same format. So why preach it? Instead, why not loosely say "kids, I want a 1 inch margin on all edges, size 12 black Times New Roman font, and as long as I can find your source if I decide to look at it we're golden." Let's spend our time focusing on content rather than counting spaces between words.

The point that I want to make by writing this is that our education system in this country quickly prancing down the road to dismal failure. It quite honestly is no surprise to me to see American students' test scores steadily falling behind those of students in other countries. The majority of our teachers have become more baby-sitter than educator. It is an absolute disgrace that someone who may one day teach my child (God willing) math is incapable of using the Pythagorean Theorem (a^2+b^2=c^2). You might laugh, but I could not tell you how many college students aspiring to become teachers there were in one particular college class that simply couldn't figure it out. Please, Mr. Anderson, don't waste my child's time counting spaces between sentences.

Personally, I love how easy it is to pick on these format people. If you were actually hoping for a case against the one period format I'd pretty much just agree with this guy. In case you weren't paying attention; yes, there are two spaces between every sentence that I've just written…and it WILL stay like that.