My general process for MLA formatting has always been to pretty much disregard it until the final draft of a paper. To me, the drafting process is inherently kind of messy and informal, and as such I don’t make an effort to perfectly format my working drafts. The more I think about it though, this may not be the best practice, as issues with MLA formatting that I miss could be picked up by others during peer review or other earlier stages of a project. Despite not including MLA formatting in most of my working drafts, however, I believe my showcased paper does not make any serious errors. The paper’s header and page numbers are as they should be, and I make sure to follow quotes pulled from “The End of Food” with (Widdicombe #), as shown in paragraph 3. I also make sure to include the hanging indent in the works cited section.
I usually catch and correct spelling or grammatical errors while writing, which is in part due to the fact that Docs/Word automatically detect most of these mistakes and mark them. Similar to MLA formatting, I try not to concern myself too much with surface-level concerns such as these while drafting, but I always read over a final draft closely at least once or twice to smooth it over. I also usually have someone else read my final draft before submitting, to ensure nothing has slipped through the cracks. As far as I am aware, my showcased paper has few to no spelling or grammatical errors.
