Over the summer we’ve been working to make sure that we had wrapped up MLA 8 for all of our users AND brought Discussion Posts (one of the most popular Mac features) to Windows. Here’s a quick look at how each of them works in the new update.
MLA 8
If you’ve never written an MLA paper before, you will be automatically upgraded to MLA 8. That’s all there is to it. 🌴🌴🌴
If you have written an MLA 7 paper before, then you will be prompted to upgrade to MLA 8 when you start the updated software for the first time. If you choose to not upgrade then, you can always go to the Settings Tab and change your version of MLA to MLA 8. You’ll find the MLA setting in the bottom left of the screen.
As a note, due to technical restrictions, we do not recommend re-using MLA 7 References in new MLA 8 Papers. Just like before, any of your APA or MLA 7 References will start with *** when viewing them in an MLA 8 Paper.
Discussion Posts
Traditional Research Papers include a Title Page, a page or pages for the body of the paper, and a separate page for References. Discussion Posts only include the body of your paper and the References on a single page. PERRLA still works just like it always has, but your paper will be formatted in a way that makes it easy to copy and paste your paper into your school’s online Discussion Forum.
We’ve updated the buttons that appear on the PERRLA start screen so that you can easily create either a Research Paper or Discussion Post for APA or MLA. In the process, we removed the buttons for Start a New APA 5th Edition Paper and Open an Existing PERRLA Paper. APA 5 isn’t being used by schools anymore, so we phased it out. You can still access all of your Existing PERRLA Papers by going to the My PERRLA Papers tab at the top.
When you start a new Discussion Post, because there isn’t a Title Page, you will only be asked for the Title of the Paper. This is so we can give your document the correct name when we save it to your computer.
Now, creating perfectly formatted Discussion Posts for your class will be easier than ever!
