Do you know any psychoanalytical theory that explains the reason why students keep forgetting the simplest MLA style rule (italics for book titles, double quotation marks for article titles)? There should be some psychic mechanism of resistance that refuses to follow it and encourages them to violate it in spite of (or because of?) the instructor's minimal advice that this is the only thing he'd like them to learn by heart among hundreds of MLA style conventions. I'm tired of commenting "do not italicize. use double quotation marks."
