Misuse of Citation

Recently I've had the chance to read some undergraduate composition and I must say I'm quite unimpressed. Teachers and professors continue to lament the falling standard of English composition of young people, a pattern that has been occurring for decades now, but I think an unlamented problem is students' disability to cite, or much more commonly, a misunderstanding of what to cite. I suppose to many, there is no sense in worrying about citations when writing skills are so embarrassingly poor anyway, but tracing the missteps in bibliographies can say a quite sizable amount about what students are thinking.

Now with a look at the qualifications for a typical undergrad essay, we can see the professors have developed the habit of requiring one, maybe two full pages of citations. I suppose to them, this forces the students to actually investigate the claims put forth in their writings and recognize if their original stances were baseless. Of course, this is not the mental method by which students go about it, and it's pretty evident just by looking at the their bibliographies; students make their claims, and then scourer the internet for claims of similar content, oft on mass-media websites, and typically statistics as well. There is no critical method here, but I suppose double-checking this is a difficultly and as I said before there are more fundamental worries about student writing. So really the arbitrary requirement that the student must have a certain number of sources is quite inert and inflates the myth that citations are necessary to make your writing look good, as we will get to later.

There also is supreme confusion over what kinds of sources should be cited and what should not. This is not just about not tracing your claims to loony-looking poorly formatted websites, but when a student is stating their opinion or normative analysis, they seem to be of the persuasion that if they cite their opinion to a news editorial or weblog, the claim becomes stronger. Opinions are options; the goal of a bibliography is to trace the source of factual claims back to their source; as egotistical as student may be, I think they can understand the difference between their opinion and fact on occasion. So the citation erroneously becomes a tool to puff up the bibliography and make the baseless claim in the text look more credible due to a citation following it. Editorials and any other opinion work obviously should be explicitly forbidden from essays and I myself would want to keep news articles in general away from bibliographies.

Anyone who works in the study of any field of specialized science can tell you that journalists generally have little to no idea what they are ever talking about. This isn't to much the fault of journalists; some subjects genuinely require a large amount of specialized knowledge to be properly encapsulated. Still science news goes from the source down to a journalist who may have miniscule specialized knowledge on the subject down to the masses who have even less. Even worse, journalists will try to inflate every scientific story into the most significant of the century, necessitating a large amount of exaggeration and puppeteering in the mouths of professionals. Students seem to be of the thought that the headlines of science news are identical to those of the studies they describe, and because they have attentions-spans far too short to even read the whole news article, of course they're not going to backtrack and find the scientific fount of it. Nevertheless, this is what needs to be done and it is why there is no reason to cite a media-source (unless the news article is describing, perhaps a current event, but even in that case a student should trace the claims made as far back as possible).

So when students have the idea that (1) citations are a requirement, (2) any source is useable, and (3) the new media are reliable they slowly "catch on" to the idea that they should puff up their works cited to look impressive and well researched. Of course the sources will inevitably be new articles and editorials and fanciful scientific news thus worthless, but for the student who is ignorant and the professor who is lazy, everything seems to work fine. Scientific rigor is floating out of the common man as he comes to believe that superficial media are the origin of all truth and fully reliable. These concerns may seem overly-grumpy, but without a good understanding of bibliographical integrity, the content of already poorly written essays will end up as a child of pop-news and democratized science. I hope that student writers have a better understanding of the purpose of citation from this short essay, but for those who haven't you can feel free to ignore entirely the content of this because it has no citations...