Metaphor For Society

In her essay “Zombies as a Metaphor for Society” Sabrina Student attempts to discuss the history and evolution of zombie-based entertainment and the social implications of this pop culture icon. According to Student, zombies are an effective storytelling vehicle to discuss societal issues at key points in American history. Careful reading of Student’s paper reveals many faults in her documentation of information sources, and a troubling lack of competency in Modern Language Association (MLA) style. Student’s page formatting, in-text citations, and the Works Cited page all contain errors ranging from minor punctuation mistakes to serious breaches of information integrity.

Student’s essay page format adheres to most of the MLA rules outlined

There are several trivial mistakes, including entries not being in alphabetical order and the unfortunate oversight of the page being titled incorrectly as “Work Cited” instead of “Works Cited” (Aaron 445). Formatting blunders include the omission of access dates on the two undated web sources (Aaron 469) and the entry for Sean Posey’s article “A Country Walking Dead: The Zombie as Metaphor in American Culture and Film” as the publisher and the website title are the same (Aaron 468). The film that is included on the works-cited page, Doc of the Dead, is listed as though the author saw the film in a theater, which seems unlikely as the documentary was released two years prior to the date of the essay. Of the six sources listed on Student’s Works Cited page, three are used incorrectly, and one newspaper article authored by Rick Allen is recorded despite not being referenced in the essay. Student’s essay seems to rely heavily on the two remaining sources, the Doc of the Dead documentary film and Sean Posey’s article for The Hampton Institute. In a notable portion from Posey’s article he wrote that “[p]ublic intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Paul Krugman, and others have used the zombie as a metaphor for everything from our dysfunctional financial system to our alienating political institutions.” This sentence is taken nearly word-for-word and used in Sabrina Student’s introduction without giving credit to the original author—an example of direct, deliberate