| name | humanities-mla |
| description | Write an argumentative humanities essay in MLA style — Introduction with an explicit thesis, body argument sections, a Conclusion, MLA author-page in-text citations (e.g. (Author 42)), and a Works Cited list. Use when the deliverable is a humanities argument built on interpretation rather than an empirical IMRaD paper. Anti-trigger; for an empirical Method/Results report use academic, for the Chicago note-bibliography convention use humanities-chicago. |
| argument-hint | <the thesis or argument to advance> |
humanities-mla
Produces an argumentative humanities essay in MLA style: a thesis-driven
argument built through close reading and interpretation, cited with MLA
author-page in-text citations and a Works Cited list. Its center of
gravity is the thesis — every body section exists to advance it through
evidence and interpretation, not to report a method or results. This genre
follows the MLA Handbook, 9th edition citation and Works Cited convention.
Scope caveat (carry, do not over-attribute): MLA author-page is a
presentation/citation convention. The genre reproduces the argumentative
structure and citation form; it does not certify scholarly sufficiency.
Verify the current MLA Handbook edition live at authoring time (the 9th
edition is current); do not bake an edition number into output as settled
fact beyond what was verified.
Pattern (industry: MLA 9th-edition humanities essay)
- Introduction — context and an explicit thesis the essay will argue.
- Body argument sections — one per major claim, each developing claim,
evidence, and interpretation; sections build the argument cumulatively.
- Conclusion — what the argument establishes and why it matters; no new
evidence introduced here.
- Works Cited — the alphabetized list of every source cited, MLA style.
There is no Method and no Results section — the essay argues; it does not
report an experiment.
Citation style
MLA author-page in-text citations, e.g. (Author 42) — the author's
surname and the page locator in parentheses — resolving to a Works Cited
list, never author-date parentheticals or numbered footnotes. Each in-text
citation resolves to a real, verifiable source (or a bound MIF finding @id
and its source URL, at the MIF Level 3 floor); no uncited claims and no
fabricated sources.
Rules
- Every claim traces to a cited source via its author-page citation; no orphan
facts.
- State the limits of the reading honestly; engage counter-interpretations. An
unaddressed strong counter-reading is a defect.
- When drawing from a verified findings corpus, do not silently drop
weakened or inconclusive findings — annotate them with an explicit
uncertainty qualifier. Exclude only falsified findings.
- Hedge uncertain interpretations; do not over-attribute when sources are
contested.
- Exhaustive coverage: when a findings corpus is supplied, build the essay
from the full surviving set — every surviving finding is treated with its
own evidence, never condensed to a cherry-picked subset.
- Figures or tables appear only where the argument genuinely needs them,
captioned and referenced; any diagram is a fenced Mermaid code block, never
ASCII art or an image link. Plain tabular matter stays a Markdown table.
- The Works Cited list is alphabetized by author surname, MLA style, and is
required back matter — never omitted, never renamed References or
Bibliography.
- No raw internal identifiers (
urn:mif: or similar) leak into prose or
citations.
Anti-triggers — do not use this genre for
- An empirical report with a Method and Results section — that is
academic: IMRaD structure, testable method, reported findings, not an
interpretive argument.
- A humanities argument cited Chicago note-bibliography style (superscript
notes + a Bibliography) rather than MLA author-page parentheticals and a
Works Cited list — that is
humanities-chicago.
- A practitioner decision report built around a mandatory options-vs-criteria
comparison table — that is
engineering.
MIF frontmatter
type: semantic — a humanities essay is declarative argumentative knowledge,
not a time-bound event or a step sequence. Climb to L2 with namespace
(humanities-mla/<area>), modified, title, and tags when the drafting
context supplies them. Gate every output with mif-validate at its target
level; the floor is --level 1. Use entity_type: humanities-paper.
Why machine-readable — the point of MIF here
| Question an agent asks | Answered by (frontmatter) |
|---|
| Is this reading still current, or has scholarship moved on? | temporal.validFrom / ttl |
| Where did the evidence come from; can I trust it? | provenance (W3C-PROV) + citations[] |
| What does this essay engage with or get formalized by? | typed relationships[] (relates-to, realized-by) |
| Which sources back which claim? | citations[] tied to each in-text author-page citation |
The same document still reads as a human MLA essay and projects losslessly to
JSON-LD and back — one artifact, two readers.
The L1 -> L3 climb (two exemplars)
templates/good-l1.md — L1 floor: id, type, created + body. A
complete, valid essay, but opaque to a machine consumer.templates/good.md — L3 (highest this genre supports): adds
namespace, modified, temporal validity, W3C-PROV provenance,
citations[] tied to the essay's sources, and a typed relationships[]
graph (e.g. relates-to a related close reading). Validate with
mif-validate --level 3.
Author at the highest level the drafting context supports (grade down
rather than fabricate). templates/bad.md shows the antipattern: an essay
with no Works Cited list backing its in-text citations.
