You heard it here first: I am starting an anti-citation-style movement.
My reason is very basic and based on personal experience: if you give the same resource and the APA Style Guide to 20 different students, you will come up with 19.5 different ways to write out the citation, most of which are entirely plausible, and none of which matches yours exactly.
This actually happened to me when I taught UC115 in the fall of 2006 and all the students were required to cite the pamphlet, The Ohio University Experience, in their final Career/Major paper. It was a waste of everyone’s time.
We talk to many fearful students at the reference desk who just want to DO IT RIGHT and GET A GOOD GRADE. We open the style guide together and discover, universally, that no format really matches the thing we are looking at, and we have to just wing it and hope.
On top of that, the Writing Center folks tell me that students come to them often with “variations” on style guides provided by professors hoping to simplify the exercise, but only muddling it further.
In my understanding, we use citation styles for 3 reasons:
1. Your reader needs to be able to find the sources you found so they can verify your facts.
2. It’s easier to track them down if it is obvious which of those numbers is the volume number and which the date, etc.
3. Different disciplines want to know different pieces first (science cares more about the date, literature cares more about the author.)
But my point is that in the digital age, this information is better recorded in a common database file, such as Excel, with each piece of the citation clearly marked, and live links wherever possible. All students need is a list of every piece they must provide. (If you can’t find the piece, leave the field blank.) This is the same for all students. You could go so far as to define the pieces for clarity (title of the web page as opposed to title of the web site), and leave a place for notes, even an abstract, even the full text. Us anti-citationists could even do this much for everyone: create just such a template and let everyone else use it.
When you hand your paper in, you provide your prof this file. Now that storage is essentially free, the size of the file doesn’t matter. If she needs it in paper, you can print it out for her — any format with the pieces labeled will do — but geesh, isn’t that the idea of links?
Any minute now there will be a truly reliable web-based way to do this, anyway. Zotero is a close possibility, for example. Once the citations are online, students can allow sharing of bibliographies, and a whole new world of connectivity and collaborative research becomes possible.
And the thing about different disciplines wanting it in different formats is just archaic. It doesn’t matter anymore.
OK, that’s my rant.
Good luck on your final papers.
