Rex's Responses in WyzAnt Answers

Here's a quick answer, Carl. MLA is the Modern Language Association, and their format is largely for academic work in the Languages and Humanities academics. APA is the American Psychological Association. Can you guess what field their style was designed for? CMS or Chicago Manual is used mostly here in the States and mostly in published works. Bluebook is for legal work. As you can see, each citation style was designed for a particular type of writing. Different areas have different points they wish to stress. In legal work, the case is the primary importance. It wouldn't make much sense to design a citation style that emphasized the case if you weren't citing cases.

The only thing I would add that is a fairly standard practice in 5 paragraph essays is that the first paragraph is typically an inverted pyramid and the last paragraph is typically a pyramid. In the intro, start out with a broad idea and narrow it down over the course of the paragraph to your thesis, which is the last sentence of that paragraph. In the conclusion, start out by restating your thesis. Reword it in a way that will emphasize what you have established in pps. 2-4, then expand it in a way that provides a broader perspective. These two pps. have the two functions of providing a master theme for the entire work and wrapping the entire work into a cohesive bundle.