Kurt Schick maintains, "As anyone who's translated a manuscript from MLA to APA and then to Chicago format knows, the only differences are sequence, punctuation, and format. Why, then, could we not simply ask students to include a list of references with the essential information? Why couldn't we wait to infect them with citation fever until they are ready to publish (and then hand them the appropriate style guide, which is typically no more difficult to follow than instructions for programming your DVR)?" (par. 9)
What do you make of his assessment? What does knowing how to cite "correctly" within a discipline's guidelines say about the values of that discipline?
Your response is due Thursday night, by 11:59 p.m.
It seems that the subject of citation is becoming quite controversial. I have heard so many different arguments for and against it, that I have never really formulated my opinion. Professors who advocate for citation sometimes go as far as to accuse students of plagiarism if they cite improperly. On the other side of the spectrum, other professors may not care, just as long as the other sources’ information are at least present in the assignment.
ReplyDeleteAs a student whose academic life has revolved around APA or MLA style, I have been coerced into conforming to a style. As Schick noted, students tend to spend too much time on citation rules, and not enough time on the quality of the writing. I agree with Schick—students have to sacrifice the quality of their writing to ensure proper citation. If students are not familiar with a certain style, then they will have to devote even more time to proper citation. First year students need to focus more time developing their writing skills, and citation should be less of an issue. However, when students begin to write actual research papers that could be considered for publication, they will need to learn how to cite properly. Assuming students have learned the basics of writing, they can now focus on incorporating the writing of other scholars into their own. Even if we don’t agree with the principles behind citation style, we still need to learn how to cite since this is a standard practice.
The citation style that a certain discipline will adopt can let us know what that discipline values. For example, disciplines that use APA, such as psychology or other sciences, will look for dates in a work. In scientific writing, timeliness is important. MLA puts greater emphasis on page number.
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ReplyDeleteWhile I agree that citation is important, I have to agree with Schick. Citation techniques should be for those who are intending to publish scholarly work. After today’s in-class exercise, it took me almost fifteen minutes to convert just one citation into APA citation. Of course, APA citation was a style that I normally do not use. Even still, when using MLA citation it still takes me some time to make sure that I have cited everything correctly. Even when I think I am correct, a professor will tell me that I missed a few things when using citation. I would not argue that I think that we should not be taught citation styles. They are important to give credit where credit is due. However, the time that students, including myself, spend on citation styles could perhaps be spent more on the content of their published work. This is not a guarantee that content might be of better quality; it is just a suggestion. I feel that students get so caught up in citing everything correctly in a style that is chosen by their professor. At the end of their undergraduate career, or particular class for that matter, they might not use that citation style ever again.
ReplyDeleteKnowing how to cite correctly in a discipline is important to learn. The citation style that the discipline uses might suggest that they are more concerned about how recent particular research is. The hard sciences use APA citation because they require years to be placed in the parenthetical notation. However, the humanities use MLA citation style because they are not as concerned about how recent research is. They are more concerned about who wrote that particular novel or researched that event. Instead, they want the author’s last name to be used in the parenthetical citation.
Why is it so hard to be a renegade?
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with Schick. I think it’s ineffective to have first-year writers obsess over style guides. What’s the point? What do they get out of it? Say next semester, I have students cite everything using MLA, and there are several Bio majors in my class, who will be using APA for the rest of their college career. What did I teach those students by having them use MLA? Exposure? I was exposed to limits in Calculus my freshman year of college, and I don’t remember how to do limits. If I needed to remember (which I won’t), I would google it. I also don’t remember how to cite a periodical in APA without googling it either.
Teaching students how to write is so much more important than teaching students how to cite, yet I have encountered so many of the nit-picky professors that Shick mentioned in his article.
Would I be scoffed at by my colleagues if I had my students list their references in a consistent manner? Probably. It seems like it’s so hard to break conventions in an academic community even when the new habit is much more effective from a teaching perspective. Maybe the solution is de-emphasize the importance of the works cited page. Not grade it maybe? I’ve had points taken off for incorrect punctuation in a citation. And all that resulted in was anxiety on due dates.
I think that the problem with style guides is that they, like lots of other things, are socially constructed. APA emphasizes the date. MLA emphasizes the text. Chicago…….I don’t know what they emphasize. Then, there are house styles with all sorts of different emphases. We’re then left asking what’s most important. Well, the answer is “it depends.” It depends on the publication. It depends on the discipline. It depends on the author. It depends upon the entire rhetorical situation of a piece of writing.
What if what I view as most important is teaching writing? Would I get in trouble for having my students read Schick’s article the first week of class and subsequently abandon style guides for the rest of the semester? I want my citation criteria to be: If I can find it, then you’re fine. Isn’t that the point of all style guides to begin with?
Maybe I’m just missing something.
I agree with what I have read so far from my colleagues, and I agree with what Schick is saying in his article. I have to be honest, I am not someone who knows all the style rules for MLA, which is what I have worked the most with in my years as a student. But I know more about MLA than I do about any of the other citation styles. One thing I know I have done is look for publications to work with that use MLA only. This is due to my comfort level with producing a work that is acceptable in the style I can present it in. I find that is a most challenging thing to do, to make decisions based on style guides instead of what content they produce.
ReplyDeleteWhy are there so many style guides? Why can't I just provide you the "relevant information" as Schick describes it? I believe it is more effective to have a set of rules that you as the professor look for in the paper. This to me lets them know that there are other things out there, but these are important to you. Maybe instead of teaching one citation style, we teach three in a class, have one paper MLA, one APA, and one Chicago? Wait, never mind. That sounds like too much work, even for the professor.
I would say that knowing how to cite correctly says you care about the discipline and that you are aware of the things they find important. But I say, as Schick says, that we all look for the same pertinent information. Why not stress that? Once we are sure that they are comfortable in doing that, then we can steer them towards a specific style guide. First-year writing students should not have to care about where a period goes in the citation or that it's called a "Reference List" and a "Works Cited Page." What they should have to care about is if the information they are reporting is accurate and credible. The other stuff can come later. If all are students care about is if they cited something correctly, they will never understand what it is they are truly learning and reading.
That's just my opinion though.
I think the point Kurt is trying to make is that professors/teachers should encourage students to focus on their writing skills – developing ideas, conducting revision, organizing ideas coherently etc. - instead of wasting time on superficial skills such as citation styles. This seems to be a logical argument because as we discussed in class that the citation style guides (MLA, APA , etc.) always seem to fall behind users’ needs and they tend to be used in an arbitrary fashion by most publications. Therefore, to emphasize citation styles at the cost of other more important writing skills does seem to be a waste of time and energy for both the teacher and student.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, as mentioned in Kurt’s article, all the different citation styles basically have the same components – author, title, and publication information – that are sequenced differently. Therefore it makes sense to teach students just to cite this information in any logical sequence that helps readers to locate the source. This way student will not have to spend too much time and worry about strictly following the rules of citation style guides and give them more time to focus on their writing -analyzing and evaluating sources, developing and organizing ideas, drafting and revising.
However, I also feel that making the students familiar with the professional citation styles does help them in understanding the demands of professional writing. Therefore, I feel that a good approach would be to create a balance where students are encouraged to practice using either of the citation styles but they are not evaluated strictly on citations. This way they will get acquainted with a citation style without being pressurized to spend too much time on citations at the cost of important aspects of their writing process.
I say we throw out the whole obsessive citation tendencies of our writing predecessors. Down with style guides! Let chaos ensue! Perhaps I’m bias because I am flat out terrible at citing sources and consistently shrink away from it by using inconsistent online sources like EasyBib.
ReplyDeleteDon’t get me wrong—I understand why citations are important. Writers need to be able to attribute people’s intellectual property to their rightful owners, but I don’t think said owners care if there is a misplaced comma in the citation.
We had an interesting discussion pertaining to this in our Teaching Writing class this afternoon. Jared Featherstone, the Writing Center Coordinator, was discussing his experiences with tutoring writing. He said he had just come from a session where a student had come to him with a 15 page document from her professor denoting inexcusable mechanical mistakes. The student was so overwhelmed by these rules that she wasn’t able to focus on more important issues in her paper. She was so plagued by these stringent rules that she wasn’t able to focus on refining her purpose, thesis, or stylistic choices. I agree with Megan when she says, “First year students need to focus more time developing their writing skills, and citation should be less of an issue.”
I can see the argument that knowing how to cite properly allows students to be familiar with the demands of publishing your writing. However, I agree with Stephen that “What they should have to care about is if the information they are reporting is accurate and credible. The other stuff can come later. If all are students care about is if they cited something correctly, they will never understand what it is they are truly learning and reading.“
Man, I hate citation styles.
Plagiarism is the number one issue that my teachers have always stressed when working on a draft since I can remember. There are even programs that we discussed in class that scan texts to see if someone’s work is their own. When writing I always have to be careful during a discussion on any given topic, to cite all my sources and make sure that the original author receives credit for their work. But the proper way to do it has always mystified me because standards are constantly changing. I agree that until I got to graduate school, it was hit or miss and we weren’t really penalized as long as we attempted to have all the necessary information.
ReplyDeleteI’m not sure if the standards that we are taught today will be relevant in the near future when a tweet becomes a relevant source, for example, how would you cite a “tweet”. Most magazines, companies, and organizations now tweet excerpts from larger works on their twitter account. If I wanted to use this excerpt which can only exclusively be found on Twitter, what am I to do about it? I agree with Schick when he says that time is wasted on formatting translating different citations styles. When I could have been evaluating whether or not a tweet is a valid source of reference (which I’m sure it isn’t), I worry instead about how to format the excerpts into either MLA or APA citations standards. I agree with Schick that different citations styles could be viewed as obstacles which waste valuable time that could be spent on evaluating sources and not citations. A universal citation style, one that could be applied on all texts, should be drafted.
I'm right there with you Lisa in anti-citation anarchy. I agree that students may have been overwhelmed with citation fever way too early in their development as writers. I remember pulling my hair out in high school over all the valuable points lost off papers because I had forgotten to italicize.
ReplyDeleteI think Schick is taking a humorous look at a necessary evil. Of course we can't abolish style guides, just like we can't get rid of all the other rules of grammar, mechanics, and so on. I don't have an issue with taking the time to correctly format a paper so that it is clean and perfect for publication/review, but I do believe professors/teachers are coming down too hard when it comes to these aspects.
We should work our way up. Like Schick says, students can focus on the content, and of course direct the reader to the proper source. Then we can get into the nitty-gritty and start looking at exactly how those sources should appear on paper. Plagiarism should be avoided at all costs, but how terrible is it really that a student used a period where a comma should go? Perhaps providing sample style guides would be the best remedy to this in order to fully accustom students to the perpetually brain-busting, morale-clouding, killjoy known as a bibliography page.
I'm torn on this issue. While I do see Schick's point of view that citations aren't as important as teaching students how to write well, I do think it's important for students to recognize and be able to successfully cite source.
ReplyDeleteTo play the devil's advocate, if students don't learn how to cite sources in a first-year writing class, where will they learn? Their major classes may already expect them to know how to do it, which is when students may panic when they don't know how. This leads them to go to websites like EasyBib, where the citations are often inconsistent, like Lisa said.
Let's face it: Most professors make students include a works cited/references page. Would we be doing these students a disservice by allowing them to shrug off citation specifications in one class to only have a professor in another class fail them for not properly including their citations?
I don’t entirely understand what Schick is suggesting we do instead of requiring students to follow a set citation format; it sounds like he’s suggesting they be allowed to make up their own format, as long as the required information is included. I don’t see what this gains, either for the student or the professor who must grade the work. Frankly, I don’t think any of the formats are that difficult, once one’s used them a few times. And, I think getting students to the point where they aren’t difficult is helpful.
ReplyDeleteWhat I do think is a problem, which Schick alludes to as well, is when professors put too much emphasis on correct citation format; for example, by subtracting multiple points for nit-picky errors in the reference section. I’ve known professors and teaching assistants who do this, and I think it’s a lazy way to get a grade distribution – certainly simpler than critiquing the more important parts of the writing, such as the organization of the paper, the development of ideas, and the effectiveness with which sources are used. Thus, I think that proper formatting should be required, but should not be a large part of a student’s grade.
Furthermore, citation formats do have something to say about the values of a particular discipline, and particularly for students who plan to continue on in that discipline, it’s important to become sensitive to those values. APA is used more in scientific disciplines where knowledge very much builds on what came before. Where in this process a study or paper occurred is very important, and thus the date appears in the in-text citation. In MLA, date is less important, and doesn’t appear in the in-text citation. Inclusion of the page number in MLA makes it much easier to find specifically where the information came from; it seems to me that APA is somehow more “trusting” of the author, since with the exception of direct quotes, it’s not nearly as specific.