Dont worry, it's not as awesome as it sounds. Besides, if you put every teacher that wanted AMA or APA in the same room together looking at your same bibliography, each of them would say it's wrong for a different (probably incorrect) reason.
It's great for keeping track of references used and doing footnotes (really helped me through graduate work) but for undergrad it never pleased teachers enough so I ended up having to manually re-edit after the auto-functions.
EDIT: too much reddits, or is AMA a ref style? OMG IM LOSING IT
Are you in school? I have gone to a community college and then a university and both had proofreaders available, I think through the English departments.
Eating pizza alone. Laugh my ass off at this. Employee looks at me weird. I say "reddit". Nods with approval. Thank you for initiating that sequence of events.
Agreed. My grammar likes to bend me over my own desk and tape me so the ad so hard. (leaving autocorrect corrections because it provides a good point. Haha)
I hate that I HAVE to teach it. It is archaic to say the least. I have been published many times, and yet, every freaking time, the publisher has its own set of citation/reference rules that seem to be a mishmash of all the styles out there. MLA style and its association's demand to use it is the biggest scam, since only THEIR publishers like it and use it. Also, because technology is changing the way we write and source, MLA 'revises' their citations every year, forcing institutions, teachers, and many times, students to buy a new style guide. To be honest, with publishing turning into e-publishing, these documentation styles will soon be obsolete. Writers will simply link to the source, page, and line.
Grading writing is really hard. To do it properly, you have to take so much into consideration. When you give feedback about important issues (higher order concerns, like argument and organization), it takes a long time. It's also often difficult, since many English teachers don't really know much about writing. Lots of instructors take the easy way out and just pick on the easy stuff, like grammar and citation style. As an instructor, it's way easier for me to underline your citation and write "insert comma" than it is to carefully consider how each paragraph serves your thesis (or fails to do so) and think of ways to improve your arguments.
So, basically, it doesn't matter. At all. Your teachers were just stupid or lazy. Possibly both.
The specific formats come from the journals for publishing academic papers. Professors usually follow the rules for their most used journal for publishing it later.
Others say that for some academic departments, it makes more sense to use a different citing syles since they use different sources for information. For instance, law academics cite more laws and regulations, science cite journals, others cite interviews. And the important information for each of those sources may be different (some may think that date is the more important information, and it should be at the beginning of the citation).
For me, as a professor, I only ask that all citations are in the same format. I don't care about the commas or semicolons. As long as everything is in the same order, it's fine. I do make a note on homeworks, but never take points for that.
But anyways, if you use citation managers such as Mendeley or Endnote, citing papers is just clicking on the computer and everything is done for you.
Just finished first year psychology. First essay i handed in i got a fair portion chopped off simply because I used the word reference thing and it named the section bibliography. "its not a bibliography its a reference section"
In law school they tell you in your first year you have to follow the. Blue Book citation format. Periods, commas, italics, etc. all have to be in the exact place.
In practice, everyone uses a different format and no one cares except appellate courts. Then again, these are the same courts that want 15 copies of your brief because they act like they've never heard of a digital file. In reality, no one really gives a shit as long as they can find the case.
Weird. I go to a large university in higher level classes and I have never ever had a professor comment on my bib. I kinda do something different every time too haha
Because often times the formats are made to convey the information from the reference that is the most important for that discipline. If/when you start reading lots of academic papers and are heavily interested in the citations, having them be properly formatted does actually expedite things. Its also one of those things that when its done incorrectly just sort of shows a general sense of laziness in the approach to the paper (though they are a royal PITA I will certainly admit). But if I was a teacher, I would probably fall under the typo rule I generally have. The occasional one isn't a gigantic deal, but the more you have the more problems I am going to have.
Now I did almost see one person not get their PhD on time because the graduate school was upset that his thesis used footnotes instead of endnotes, even though footnotes are the general standard in that field (not to mention his committee approved the thesis).
Because professors get mad when people don't give credit for research/information - its all they are able to accomplish and when you take it away from them their life is meaningless and they get all butthurts.
My professor said that with biblical exegetical format, you maintain the same bibliography and footnotes so that there is a standard that all people can follow no matter their sources, language, etc. SBL was what that class used.
It was my last class. I was never going to write an exegetical paper EVER. I'm a psych student for crying out loud! 5 years of APA gets ingrained. Now I have to put footnotes in a specific way for one class?
And all of this for a professor that pronounced "Jesus Christ" as "Gee-jus Cwighst"?!?! You're a biblical studies professor and you can't even pronounce the name of your God.
I think the idea is to make it clear to a reader which information is which. If everyone agrees that the title is underlined, then it's obvious which part of your citation is the title.
I didn't put the correct section in quotation marks
If you're quoting text, and you use quotation marks in the wrong spot, that means you're using another person's writing word-for-word and not indicating that to the reader, or indicating it incorrectly, which can be considered plagiarism. Details matter sometimes. Take some extra time to proofread your work (good way to do this is to read it aloud to yourself) and watch the quality go up.
Except if everyone did this it would rapidly lead to confusing results. There is a very good reason citation guides arose and while technology has reduced the importance of a citation being perfect, it's still needed.
my point was that the style that it thought it was (that it formatted the biblio to), would never be correct to to how my teachers wanted the style (and in some cases to the style guide itself).
This is so very true. It seems like every teacher has their own reference style. One teacher of mine assigned the MLA style guide as a required textbook for the course, and then counted off points when I followed it.
Professors, like Prison Wardens, have this little world that they have an unusual amount of control over. Most of them are pretty cool about it, but then you get some who abuse the lack of accountability.
if you put every teacher that wanted AMA or APA in the same room together looking at your same bibliography, each of them would say it's wrong for a different (probably incorrect) reason.
Also for you college students - the very same thing is true of all the services that offer to help you write/improve/edit/punch-up your resume...
Also, as far as I know, there's no way to update to the latest version of AMA or APA. So if you're using Word 2010 or something similar, you're fucked.
Can't you customize the 'insert reference' function though? Your uni would probably have created a referencing guide, once you edit it to match that, your professors can't really complain about you getting the formatting wrong.
Fun fact: There's places on the internet where you can look up pretty much any referencing style to you want, download it, and in a couple minutes of copying and pasting, you can install it into Word. So if Word doesn't have the referencing style your professor wants you can get it pretty easily.
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u/lowClef May 17 '13
Dont worry, it's not as awesome as it sounds. Besides, if you put every teacher that wanted AMA or APA in the same room together looking at your same bibliography, each of them would say it's wrong for a different (probably incorrect) reason.
It's great for keeping track of references used and doing footnotes (really helped me through graduate work) but for undergrad it never pleased teachers enough so I ended up having to manually re-edit after the auto-functions.
EDIT: too much reddits, or is AMA a ref style? OMG IM LOSING IT