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)

1. Introduction — context and an explicit thesis the essay will argue.
2. Body argument sections — one per major claim, each developing claim, evidence, and interpretation; sections build the argument cumulatively.
3. Conclusion — what the argument establishes and why it matters; no new evidence introduced here.
4. 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

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.