And, lo, in the 5th week of the semester, as the piles of papers, lab reports, and other assorted grading loomed ever larger, a great cry went out over the land: Can any of these students cite correctly?
Whether it’s MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian, or any other style, students often give format and citation questions short shrift. Some will turn to sites such as the Citation Machine, Citation Builder, or HackCollege’s new Bibliograph! bookmarklet–but even such services, when they are accurate (and they often aren’t), don’t correct for things such as page margins, double-spacing, etc. And so things slip.
ProfHacker is here to help.
I generally take two different approaches: First, with all students I encourage the use of tools such as Zotero, to automate the management of references and notes as they work their way through college. That’s more of a long-term solution. And, with all students I emphasize the importance of providing readers an easy-to-read paper and with the ability to follow up on your sources. (This is why my favorite feature in Wikipedia is the “link to a permanent version of this page.”)
But, in a second step, I also decide how much I care that these particular students learn a particular style with any real detail. And, really, with most general education courses, I’ve decided I don’t care. If you’re never going to take another English class, then what difference does it make whether you’ve mastered MLA style’s nuances? So in lower-division classes I just hit a few key points, and that’s it.
Courses for majors are a different thing, and so I expect that students know, or need to know, MLA style. And here I borrow an insight from coaching youth sports: If you want students to get better at something, you can’t just explain it, you have to let them practice it directly, not along the way to something else. And so what I’ve done is developed an MLA style assignment. Here’s the direct link. (I’ve mentioned this assignment briefly before.) Key features:
- It’s ungraded, but it has to be successfully completed before any graded assignment will be accepted.
- By using Lorem Ipsum text instead of actual writing, it ensures that all the focus is on style/citation questions–neither the student nor I can get distracted by pesky things like meaning or grammar.
- Once the students have completed it, they have a model that they can use in the future, and hopefully a little bit of muscle memory. (“The button to change page margins is on the Formatting Palette in Word.”)
How do you teach your students good citation practices? Do you care whether they use your discipline’s style? Explain in comments!
Image is by flickr user tvol / CC licensed
Comments
1. John - October 08, 2009 at 11:53 am
This advice sounds especially good for teaching students to switch their citation style. I really struggled with this. I used MLA all through high school, APA during undergrad, and the Bluebook during law school. It took about a year each time to retrain my brain to stop using the old format and switch to the new.
2. Sherman Dorn - October 08, 2009 at 11:54 am
More than ten years ago, I created an online tutorial on plagiarism, and while it has suffered from linkrot, I still refer students to it and other resources before they have to take a mandatory quiz on plagiarism and fair use... which they may take as many times as necessary to pass, because they have to pass to turn in any papers for a grade.
3. Bonnie - October 09, 2009 at 12:35 pm
You are very right that students don't get it if you just tell them to do it - they need practice. Your friendly neighborhood librarian can also be a resource to assistance in teaching these concepts to your students.
In regards to your assignment: I see questions at the reference desk occasionally where a student has to find a print journal article on a subject. As more and more journals are now available online, and as storage space and money are becoming scarce, our library has access to fewer journals in print (although our access to journals has increased overall). Assignments like these can become more difficult (although I suppose if you don't care about the topic of the article it wouldn't be too difficult)
In addition, the differences between 'web' and 'print' styles of citation are getting smaller.
4. stevenb - October 09, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Have you explored the citation creation features of library databases from Ebsco and Proquest and others. See your librarians to find out which library databases at your institution have this feature. With the click of a button the students can create a citation in one of several formats. Yes, it can be a shortcut for students, but it can also be a learning tool when used regularly.
5. George H. Williams - October 10, 2009 at 09:28 am
That's a good point, but in my experience the reliability (reliabilities?) of those features are all over the map: I just did a quick test and posted the results here. I'm pleasantly surprised by what EBSCO provides, but the others are quite different. Having said that, I'm teaching the best use of these tools (and these features) in 2 courses this semester (2 sections of first-year composition, and 1 section of an introduction to literary studies) and will work on doing a better job of covering the strengths and weaknesses of the automatic citation creation functions.
6. Steve Ehrmann - October 16, 2009 at 06:47 pm
As a doctoral student, I don't think anyone ever got me to think about the purpose of citations. And in the ensuing decades as a program officer reviewing grant proposals for interdisciplinary programs and as a reviewer for journals, I've noticed that very, very, very faculty seem to have been taught about the purpose of citations, either. (Stephen, 1978; Ehrmann, 2009) The citation style I just used imitates the style of citation use that has frustrated me as a reviewer of grant proposals and draft journal articles for 30+ years. The only way this citation style would make sense is if the author is sure that the reader a) already knows the cited literature and its relevance to the article, or b) is willing and able to lay hands on each article quite quickly, and c) wouldn't have remembered those citations without this reminder. (Charles, 1992)
For me as a reader, none of these conditions were met, ordinarily. I didn't know the articles, certainly didn't know whether to trust them, and had no idea why they were being cited. What I wanted, and almost never got, was a paragraph smmarizing the article and its methodolog or content sufficiently: if the citation is worth making, give me enough information to understand 1) how this reference relates to the author's case, and 2) whether it is worth my time to read the article itself to get even more insight.
Do your students use citations? to good purpose?
7. Joe Phillips - November 29, 2009 at 06:24 pm
I am working on an undergrad degree now, and I have been using a mishmash of the EBSCO provided citation and the Word 2007 tool. I can't get either one to work properly for the current version of APA, so I am going to try out the Firefox extension. I will let you know how it goes!
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.