I stumbled on a piece called EZ Bibilographies over at the Chronicle of Higher Education. The tag line is "Do Web sites that format citations for students negate the need to teach them how to create a proper source list?"

"Here we go," I thought, "someone else opining about the pleasures of doing a completely inane task and lamenting that if we don't teach students when to use a period, a comma, and italics in some insanely stupid format designed before computers by people who create rules that are almost impossible to follow correctly because the people who created the system don't understand grammar well enough to recognize the inconsistencies. Computer scientist may not be able to use natural languages very well, but I learned some things about grammar when studying programming languages that I didn't learn in the two years that Nikki Velotas taught me Latin.

Sometime in my first or second semester of graduate school I found apa.cls, a LaTeX package that does all of the APA formatting of the document and the references. I have almost no idea when to use italics or any of that stuff. I have never owned an APA manual. I have about 2300 entries in my database. You can see them all in 65 pages of perfectly formatted APA citations.

So I was sure that this guy was going to say that since he did it the hard way and found doing his references by hand a peaceful and pleasant part of finishing a paper was going to say that his students should do the same, but he didn't With these new Web tools, can we stop covering this specialized skill? Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your perspective, the answer is no. He then went on about how even with these tools students had questions about what to do if there were multiple cities, or multiple publishers, or how do cite web sites. He didn't make the point quite as loudly as I might. The point, to me, is that computers are good at doing the same thing over and over again and we're not. So if you can get the computer to put in the commas and italics, you should let it (even if it means doing some extra work up front, but that's another story). With the busywork removed you can now focus on stuff that actually requires thinking. Pontificating about how some student left out a comma or didn't use italics correctly makes you sound like an irrational loon, pontificating that the formatting was correct but that it was still wrong because you still didn't know what the source of the citation one suggests that maybe there's more to doing citations than commas and it's worth spending some time learning it.

I feel my students' pain when they complain about faculty members who are reported to be irrational sticklers for APA formatting. But then, I get papers that cite things in ways that I find confusing or distracting. And I look at the references to find a piece that sounded like something that I would want to read and I can't figure out from the citation where to get the piece.

I sent the author an email that this piece no longer resembles, and ended it with this piece of advice:

And don't forget to tell them that they should use Wikipedia to find out who Jane Austin was but that if they cite Wikipedia---or the Encyclopedia Britannica as a source, they get an F.