My White Whale: Writing Styles and the ocean of confusion

October 29, 2009

I’ve been teaching for a decade now, was in college for 11 years writing research, and before that spent the required amount of time in high school. I’ve probably written 4-5 dozen researched papers and have probably taught the form to at least 25 different courses. Mr. Morgan in 11th grade English class back in the early 1990s taught me how to use notecards and bib cards and also how to cite in MLA. I never officially learned how to cite in MLA and still look things up, and it wasn’t until graduate school that I had to use APA. My family and colleagues say that APA is easier, but I am use to MLA. A lot of college instructors I hear about don’t require a certain style; they just want the students to pick one and go for it. I’ve had colleagues tell me they teach APA because it’s easier or more relevant, so sometimes I wonder if I don’t teach MLA, will they see it in college? Which brings me to to question really: Does a certain citation format matter? Is there a standard anymore, or is it slowly going by the wayside? I’ve seen several different citation formats recently in different venues, and a recent district workshop instructor in response to my question about adding citations to a lesson unit required of me that included required images from the internet told me, “don’t bother with that. No one will know.” Now, the discussion of copyright is another story all together for a different post, but let’s talk about citations here.

My friend and colleague Shelley Rodrigo recently published the 2009 MLA updated The Wadsworth Guide to Research with Susan Cochran-Miller. In that book she covers the big three at length: APA, MLA, and CSE. But the strong thing they did was begin to make these styles relevant. The citations are for things like Flickr comments, YouTube videos, etc… media and resources relevant today. There’s a subsequent website, too. Moreover, her book is more about how to build citations than just how to look them up in her book.

Shelley and I present together often, and we typically use Creative Commons images we find on Flickr for our presentations. When citing this work I’ve followed Shelley’s lead with citations, but for the traditionalist this can become concerning with authors like “ferretbaby” and “billybob69696″. In terms of Web 2.0 all students are also teachers, all writers are also authors, everyone with a camera becomes the photographer, and this is really ok albeit not everyone is ready to embrace non-refereed publication of the neophyte’s work.

As I continue to attend workshops, I watch how presentation images are cited. Sometimes there’s full pages in formal MLA or APA, other times there is a hodgepodge of information that may include the URL, may include the name of the creator, and may include date information. I say “may include” because many times this information isn’t there. I’ve seen huge discrepancies from all sorts of people to colleagues who model writing styles daily in their classes to some of the top instructional technologists in my field. I was surprised recently to realize 1) many of my high school colleagues don’t even know where to begin with writing styles and 2) many of them don’t teach documentation style at all.

Some presenters I see make up their own citation style based off of real styles. If we as educators learn to understand these styles, then when something new emerges, we can work through the citation format. Shelley and I have been pulling creative commons images from Flickr for most of this year now to use for presentations, and below you will see the citation style we use.

As you can see here the syntax is different than you’d expect, but you have the creative commons denotation (CC), the uploader’s name (we call this person uploader because we can’t differentiate who has shot the photo versus who has upload privileges), how we can to find the image, the title, and the link (embedded). One thing to note here is that it’s more important in understanding the different parts of a citation to learn how to do build this rather than just arbitrarily pasting a URL under a photo they snagged from who-knows-where on the web. That personally scares me. Of course, I always hear the argument of “why bother?”, but think of it this way. If I shot that photo, spent time downloading it, spent time composing it, and spent more time editing it in CS3, then you better damn well believe I want attribution. If we fail to keep this in mind, then powerful collective concepts like creative commons fails and you can go back to using clip art or buying stock photos. None of us want that.

Presenter at state conference whose data citation included ONLY the URL.

Notice that this man has used this famous image of Barack Obama and provides a link only. He didn’t even attribute the artist. This presentation image was shot by me at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco in March 2009. Not even at this prestigious conference does some presenters both with writing style citations.

Now that MLA has released their 2009 updates, and with the recent release of the 2009 APA updated style guide and all of the controversy over the blatant errors with that guide, I have no idea where we’re headed. I do know only that as the few strive for consistency of the seas of writing, for me, the beacon of light of the holy writ of style guides is muddied by the clouds of the academy who cannot make up their minds.

Posted in conferences, copyright, presentations