From Library Babel Fish, April 12, 2011
I recently returned from a brief encounter with some fascinating ideas at “4Cs” – the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. For years I have found people in the field of composition to be some of the sharpest minds around, and like librarians, they tend to be unusually attuned to the baffling glossolalia that students encounter when they reach academia and are introduced to the discourse norms of psychology at 9 in the morning, biology at 10:30, and history in the early afternoon of the very same day, each with its unique assumptions, language, values, and rules. Librarians want students to learn skills they can use after college, and those who introduce undergraduates to writing for college also want students to learn how to write, full stop. And yet, like librarians, they tend to be seen as providing a “service” to other departments and feel they owe it to their students to help them survive college. That often means librarians help students look up information on topics about which the students know little and care less; composition instructors get to put first year students through the grueling paces of writing about sources they barely understand in a format that few will ever use again after college.
Though I’m not in the field of composition, I got invited to contribute to a panel after writing a bad-tempered blog post back in 2009, during the Great APA Catastrophe. Briefly, both MLA and APA published major updates to their citation rules within a short period of time; the APA added some frustratingly convoluted conventions, and then had to issue a multi-page set of corrections that we were supposed to add to the new edition by hand. We were not amused. But more than that, we questioned the emphasis on painstakingly citing sources correctly when it detracts from more important issues such as asking interesting and genuine questions, understanding evidence, and communicating persuasively.
On our panel I questioned the fetish of citation correctness, Doug Downs and ZuZu Feder examined the double standard that we impose on students (are we so careful of whether we need a colon or a comma in that part of a citation? Would we reject an article submitted to a peer-reviewed journal over trivial mistakes in citations? Is the whole point to get students to confess what they don’t know?) Nick Carbone made the refreshing suggestion that students first learn to write using sources the way people outside academia do—drawing them into the text as journalists and essayists do. The fussiness of citation rules can be left until students are writing something truly academic, in their junior or senior year.
I’m in love with this idea. I have long agreed with Richard Larson who wrote way back in 1982 that the research paper as taught in college is an artificial genre, one that works at cross-purposes to actually developing respect for evidence-based reasoning, a measured appreciation