By Kurt Schick
My university recently convened
an emergency "summit" for librarians, tutors, and concerned faculty
members to solve a citation crisis. Our library help desks reportedly cannot
complete their core mission of assisting students with information literacy
(finding, choosing, and using sources) because students keep pestering them
with questions about how to format obscure citations: "I'm analyzing
poetry for my 'Punk Literature' seminar. Using MLA style, how do I cite a
limerick scribbled in the third-floor toilet?"
Meanwhile, the writing center
stinks of fear as students struggle to decipher APA, MLA, AP, and Chicago (or
is it Turabian?) documentation styles, which seem as alien and absurd to them
as using a typewriter. Academic departments and even whole colleges
consistently beg the library and writing center for workshops to rehabilitate
their worst citation transgressors. Bibliographic citation has apparently
eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of
persnickety professors.
What a colossal waste. Citation
style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of
academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred
academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit
ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize
as relatively useless to them as developing writers.
Professors' obsession with
citation formatting is relatively new. Many of us over the age of 40 probably
cannot remember learning much about citation styles until graduate
school—not because our memories have faded, but because our teachers knew
better than to demand that we fret about such specialized, scholarly
formalities. It's not that they were teaching us to be sloppy scholars, either.
On the contrary, they emphasized how to effectively and responsibly locate,
evaluate, and integrate other writers' words and ideas into our own writing
better, perhaps, than we teach students to do today. Surely, the uneven quality
of information available online makes it more important for writers to know how
to evaluate the worth of their sources than how to parse pedantic rules and
display their expertise in footnoting.
What I advocate here is not to
dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our
fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution. Here's
why: We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular
writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies.
Professors' overattention to flawless citation (or grammar) creates predictable
results: Students expend a disproportionate amount of precious time and
attention trying to avoid making mistakes. Soon, they also begin to associate
"good" writing with mechanically following rules rather than
developing good ideas.
In contrast, experienced
writers (like us) edit meticulously only after they have allocated substantial
effort to more complex and consequential writing tasks, such as refining their
topics, selecting and processing their sources, organizing their ideas, and
drafting and revising their manuscripts to improve focus and coherence.
Nitpicky professors hinder student writers' development by effectively forcing
them to invest more time and thinking in less important elements of writing.
Recent research by the Citation Project corroborates how severely
teachers' citation psychosis has diminished students' information-literacy skills,
in particular. Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson blame "plagiarism
hysteria," which compels teachers to punish improper citation more than
reward students' effective use of sources' words and ideas. Thus, clever
students master quotation "mining" and sloppy paraphrasing, and they
rarely summarize (or, presumably, deeply read or understand) their sources. Why
should they, when success equals completing a checklist ("minimum
of six sources including two books, two peer-reviewed articles ... proper MLA
format, including a period before the parenthetical citation for block
quotations") rather than composing writing that
engages readers with sophisticated content or, heaven forbid, eloquent prose?
Should we not judge writing on its content and character rather than its
surface features?
The intricacies and formalities
of citation become useful to scholars only when they publish their work. Until
then, they need a bookkeeping system to keep track of where they found things
(a system that others might later use to retrace their steps), and some means
of attributing their sources and thus establishing the credibility of
information for their audiences. More than anything, source attribution enables
students—who, by virtue of being students, don't yet know much about a
subject—to borrow knowledge and ethos from those who do. It's just about
that simple.
What might be more surprising
is how simple formal citation mechanics really are. Citation contents are
virtually the same across styles and disciplines: author's name(s), title(s),
publication information. 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)?
We could then reinvest time
wasted on formatting to teach more-important skills like selecting credible
sources, recognizing bias or faulty arguments, paraphrasing and summarizing
effectively, and attributing sourced information persuasively and responsibly.
If anything, we should abandon
trivial roadblocks so that students can write more often in more classes.
Recent research demonstrates how effectively and efficiently writing can
improve comprehension of content in any discipline. Writing also enables
students to practice analysis, synthesis, and other skills that constitute
critical, creative, and even civic thinking. If writing provides one of our
best means to enhance learning outcomes across the curriculum, then more writing
equals more learning. Why would we design writing assignments with obstacles
that discourage students from learning?
Kurt Schick teaches writing at James Madison University.
--
Dr. Rosa Maria
Pegueros, J.D., Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of History
& Women's Studies Program
University of Rhode Island, RI 02881-0817
Phone: <a href="tel:%28401%29%20874-4092" value="+14018744092" target="_blank">(401) 874-4092; Fax 874-2595
E-mail: [hidden email]
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/pegueros.html
Professing History:
http://professinghistory.blogspot.com/
"Once social change begins, it
cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducated the person who has learned to read.
You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. And you cannot oppress the
people who are not afraid anymore."
-Cesar E. Chavez
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