Inspired by today’s Mises Daily: Do the MLA and APA citation styles discourage students from actually reading the source? I ghostwrite essays, and generally I don’t really carefully read what I source. I generally know what it says and I cite it. You can get away with it, because the likelihood of a professor going through all the sources of all the papers he gets is very low. Would it be better if universities made students cite page numbers (APA and MLA don’t)?
I think the purpose of MLA and APA is to prepare the student for citation styles used in professional journals (as if everyone who goes through college is going to write a research article!). But, obviously, professionals have an incentive to be careful with their citations. An incorrect or inaccurate citation can eliminate their credibility.
But, this incentive doesn’t exist in college. 1. Who cares about credibility? Nobody is reading it but your professor. 2. Like I said, the chance your professor is actually going to check the source is close to nill.
#2 is prob. true even if you cite a specific page number, but if you are forced to cite a page number you might believe the chance to be caught on lying is higher than it would be otherwise. It might provide an incentive for the writer to actually read what he cites and make sure it coincides with what he claims in his paper.
What do you guys think?
P.S. On that note, I don’t think forcing students to write is a great educational strategy, but I’m not trying to enter in such a broad discussion (I actually have an article on this coming out at some point in the future).
That’s an interesting theory, and I would say I more or less agree. I do believe if a student had to cite a page number they would be more likely to be careful…and I wouldn’t be surprised if it would entice a grader to look up sources every now and then just for kicks…or possibly to target students they don’t like, which in turn would lead students to actually read more of what they’re citing.
However I wouldn’t necessarily term this enabling of students to get away with being lazy as “discouraging” students from reading the source.
And by ghostwriting, you mean you are fraudulently hired to write term papers for students who pass them off as their own classwork?
Officially, I write templates – what they decide to do with that template is up to them (but, we all know the truth). The article coming out at some point in the future defends the ghostwriter within the context of the current monopolized education system. I don’t think ghostwriting would be a problem in a free education system.
In my current english class, we are writing about and reading about posthumanism, and i have cited Mises, Schumpeter, Brzezinski, Alexander, Plato, Manly P Hall, and the professor has not checked any of them. It is not required that you use any sources outside of the two for each topic and book (Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and Promethea along with academic critiques of each) I make sure they are accurate, tho. I’m usually not trying to pull one over.
Is this lucrative? I am the only one in class who got an ‘A’ for our first paper, i just submitted my final draft for the second…
Mark, it’s lucrative if you can put yourself out there and you advertise yourself enough. It can also be risky. I live in a city with three major universities and five or six community colleges, though, so I don’t have to write for anybody at my school. But, I’m soon taking a job as an editor of a newsletter, so whenever I start getting paid for that I plan to stop ghostwriting – the money is good, but it also forces me to stay at home and it takes up time (not always writing… but it’s hard for me to just sit down and write for a long time, so I have to play games or music in between).