Press "Enter" to skip to content

Software for Citations vs. Memorization of Academic Style

Admittedly, I dislike the stylistic rules of academic writing. Citations, I understand, but style rules should be limited to those rules that help ensure clarity. In science, I want the Oxford comma, for example, so groupings are clear within a list.

I am not a stickler for citations, either, as long as student is close enough that I understand he or she wasn’t trying to plagiarize words. Citations are important, but young people stress about them because of the approaches we take to teaching academic writing and grading papers.

Our approach to academic writing tells students to worry about formatting and citation perfection over their self-expression. My own bias, from working with at-risk and special needs students who would meltdown and spend endless hours on citations if they believed (rightly or not) that the formatting could cost them a grade. They’d focus so much on this that they would suffer writing paralysis.

When we grade where periods go, that’s what students will attend to out of fear and dread. That’s been especially true for my second-language / non-native students. Students focus on the points deducted, seldom the praise we offer. It’s like the negatives get magnified several times over for many of them.

When I teach academic writing or when I write an academic article, the gold-standards for writing style and citation formats are the APA and MLA. Technically, these are the APA Publication Manual and the MLA Handbook. Students and scholars simply refer to APA and MLA when discussing these guides.

A colleague explained that the academic styles are, relatively speaking, new concepts and publications. I checked online, using both Wikipedia and organization websites.

According to the APA, their style was formalized in the late 1920s, but the famous Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association was published first in 1957.

APA Style® originated in 1929, when a group of psychologists, anthropologists, and business managers convened and sought to establish a simple set of procedures, or style rules, that would codify the many components of scientific writing to increase the ease of reading comprehension.

As with other editorial styles, APA Style consists of rules or guidelines that a publisher observes to ensure clear and consistent presentation of written material. It concerns uniform use of such elements as

selection of headings, tone, and length;
punctuation and abbreviations;
presentation of numbers and statistics;
construction of tables and figures,
citation of references; and
many other elements that are a part of a manuscript.

The MLA style is newer, relatively. The little information I could locate on Amazon and the MLA website suggest the Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers of Research Papers was first published in 1977. The MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing  was published in 1985 with a second (1998) and third edition (2008) issued before the MLA discontinued their style manual. The Wikipedia entry suggests that there will not be a fourth edition.

The dates of the MLA guides would explain why I never encountered it in high school or undergraduate studies. My teachers and professors wouldn’t have seen it or used it in the 1980s. Looking at what papers I do have, they used footnotes (so painful with a typewriter) and a bibliography that doesn’t seem to be either style now used.

From the MLA:

Is a new edition of the MLA Style Manual going to be published?

No. The MLA Style Manual will be taken out of print. The system of documentation explained in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook is the authoritative source for MLA style as of April 2016. The MLA is in the process of developing additional publications to address the professional needs of scholars.

Published 8 April 2016

Another colleague anecdotally reported that a bookstore informed him the APA is kept at the counter because it is the second most stolen book, behind the Bible. That APA is stolen from bookstores and libraries doesn’t surprise me. When I go the Half Price Books, they have MLA handbooks but not APA guides on hand.

Teaching APA and MLA is the week I dread in a writing course.

My slides and lecture notes for the day or two I spend on academic styles and citations focus on the MLA-creator and APA-data differences. The styles are philosophically different, reflecting the original disciplines that created the guides. MLA style (present tense for dead authors) seemed strange to me. I recall the page numbers of books mentioned in articles never quite being the same pages in my paperback copies of the same works. Very annoying that citations refer to a specific edition. At least digital editions allow for searches of the text.

As writing teachers what we’re dealing with is the semester clock and its power over what a program or person can do in that limited time. I spend two session, or one week (T/Th), on the academic styles. During those class days, probably two-thirds of the time are on the paper and only a half-hour or less on the works cited page. That one week is necessary to explain that, yes, the TAs, graders, and some professors in other disciplines stress the “rules” though there are so many variations it is difficult to be “right” all the time.

One week. Three hours (more like 2.5) for my version of “Here is what MLA tries to privilege and why” to a group of 20 to 30 students. MLA reflects “authority of the creator” and “living, ongoing work / conversation” philosophically. I invest a lot more time on APA style, which is more dominant at the schools in which I’ve worked. APA simply aligns more with my philosophy and my biases as a writer. The past is the past, so use past tense. Dates are important because research should be current. What we often thought we knew in the past is now known to be incorrect. I appreciate the APA philosophy.

Since I use the software tools and never seemed to have serious problems with the tools, I teach those during that week. The librarians usually demonstrate free or web-based databases and citation formatters. I demonstrate EndNote and BookEnds, generally, followed by the minimally useful Microsoft Word reference tools. Seriously, the software tools have never messed up my in-line or concluding citations, thankfully. (I do teach GIGO to students: if you put bad data into EndNote or Zotero, you will have an invalid citation. Check the data!)

Maybe the one week is enough. Maybe it isn’t. I’m not sure one way or another.

Writing programs usually enforce a plagiarism policy and all but one campus at which I taught used the plagiarism service Turnitin to verify student originality. I don’t care for these tools, but I do explain to students that words “belong” to the author, and all creative works belong to a person, group of people, or entity. More often, the owner is a corporation so we at least offer the creator some respect along the way and help future researchers follow the breadcrumbs.

Most academic writing instructors explain that citations, in our culture, increase authority of a work. We explain future scholars might want to build on your research. But for 99 percent of students, MLA and APA are those three letter things that mean “points deducted for honest mistakes in formatting.”

We can teach the rhetoric of academic styles (I do so with much mocking included), but that week is still unpleasant for most students. I imagine they are reflecting on and anticipating what other grading rubrics will emphasize: form over substance.