Across the United States today, nearly every college student has either seen or heard of MLA formatting before; however, many students still do not know how to properly incorporate the MLA formatting into their essays. For many years, I shared this same struggle. It was during my various high school research projects, when MLA formatting finally clicked for me. Despite this initial challenges with MLA formatting, my experience through recent research projects gave me the much needed opportunity to familiarize myself with the MLA writing format in order to bring my essays to the next level.
Up until two years ago, my experiences with both MLA and research have been very limited; that is, until my teacher asked me to do an research project called National History Day. National History Day is a project where students across the country select a topic from history and spend months researching their subject in order to create a final product. This project starts in August and, if you make it to the final round of competition, ends in June. For two years I have competed at the national level. This project requires just short of a year of non stop
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It was National History Day that taught me about the mechanics of citing a source. Before this project, I knew little on how citing sources worked. National History Day showed me how to create a bibliography, find the information needed for work cited entry, and how to present my resources within my product to defend my thesis. Through this, I also formed an understanding on how to perform research. Before, I would find the first online article Google gave me on the topic, but now I do much more in-depth research. For example, for the National History Day projects, my partner and I spend months scrolling through various national archives of data and documents to find the ones that would best defend our