The Importance of Citation
As I am grading my College English exams I have started thinking of the importance of citation at various levels of education. This response found on the Macleans OnCampus blog intervenes with the larger discussion around citation and citation styles. Namely, should we as educators be spending time teaching proper MLA or Chicago or APA styles or could this time be best spent with other activities?
I strongly believe in the importance of proper MLA, exactly for the reason why it exists in the first place, to allow those who read your work to refer back to the secondary sources you are using (and find them with relative ease), and simultaneously give proper credit to those who wrote these secondary sources.
Many of my students ask if they can use the many bibliographic software available when they are creating their work cited. I tell them that it is okay to do so, however I strongly encourage them to check the citations that are created afterwards for accuracy.
Explaining why we have to cite is not the difficult idea, the students easily grasp why citation exists. What is difficult is for them to remember HOW to do it. Also having to explain/justify with each change in the MLA handbook why it is important to have that "print" and "web" designations, is becoming more difficult as well. (I remember a friend who was finishing her dissertation just as the new MLA handbook was released and she had to go through her bibliography and add "print" everywhere. A complete exercise in tedium!)
The reason why it is difficult for these students to retain the proper format for MLA or Chicago, etc. and thus they end up producing some sort of Frankenstein's monster citation style, is actually because of our easy-access information culture. Students have to physically retain less, because more is readily available.
Remember that whole kingdom, phylum, class, order, species thing we had to remember in high school? How about the periodic table? I created great mnemonics to remember the transition metals (Timmy's Violin Concertos Make Funny Country Noise Clucks) (Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu). Students don't have to do that as much anymore because the information is there at their fingertips, in their iphones, on the computer.
So what does that mean for citation styles? Unfortunately it means that students will not remember the colon between the city and the publisher, nor the comma before the year. We can try to instill this information but it will only be absorbed in small degrees. What this will mean for the future of citation in general is more ominous. Will we become incapable of sourcing back to the article being cited, or worse will we degrade into a hyper-plagerized society? I think Baudrillard is calling....
I strongly believe in the importance of proper MLA, exactly for the reason why it exists in the first place, to allow those who read your work to refer back to the secondary sources you are using (and find them with relative ease), and simultaneously give proper credit to those who wrote these secondary sources.
Many of my students ask if they can use the many bibliographic software available when they are creating their work cited. I tell them that it is okay to do so, however I strongly encourage them to check the citations that are created afterwards for accuracy.
Explaining why we have to cite is not the difficult idea, the students easily grasp why citation exists. What is difficult is for them to remember HOW to do it. Also having to explain/justify with each change in the MLA handbook why it is important to have that "print" and "web" designations, is becoming more difficult as well. (I remember a friend who was finishing her dissertation just as the new MLA handbook was released and she had to go through her bibliography and add "print" everywhere. A complete exercise in tedium!)
The reason why it is difficult for these students to retain the proper format for MLA or Chicago, etc. and thus they end up producing some sort of Frankenstein's monster citation style, is actually because of our easy-access information culture. Students have to physically retain less, because more is readily available.
Remember that whole kingdom, phylum, class, order, species thing we had to remember in high school? How about the periodic table? I created great mnemonics to remember the transition metals (Timmy's Violin Concertos Make Funny Country Noise Clucks) (Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu). Students don't have to do that as much anymore because the information is there at their fingertips, in their iphones, on the computer.
So what does that mean for citation styles? Unfortunately it means that students will not remember the colon between the city and the publisher, nor the comma before the year. We can try to instill this information but it will only be absorbed in small degrees. What this will mean for the future of citation in general is more ominous. Will we become incapable of sourcing back to the article being cited, or worse will we degrade into a hyper-plagerized society? I think Baudrillard is calling....
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