A couple weeks ago, I wrote about why I use Google docs to teach writing at all levels. I’ve been using it for years–long before AI was a thing–in part because being able to see the history of a student’s Google doc is a teachable moment on the importance of the writing and revision process. This also has the added bonus of making it obvious if a student is skipping that work (by using AI, by copying/pasting from the internet, by stealing a paper from someone else, etc.) because the document history goes from nothing to a complete document in one step. I’m not saying that automatically means the student cheated, but it does prompt me to have a chat with that student.
In a similar vein and while I’m thinking about putting together my classes for the fall term, I thought I’d write about why I think teaching citation practices is increasingly important in research writing courses, particularly first year composition.
TL;DR version: None of this is new or innovative; rather, this is standard “teaching writing as a process” pedagogy and I’ve been teaching research writing like this for decades. But I do think it is even more important to teach citation skills now to help my students distinguish between the different types of sources, almost all of which are digital rather than on paper. Plus this is an assignment where AI might help, but I don’t think it’d help much.
I’ve always required and taught students how to use MLA and/or APA citation, but until a few years ago, I wasn’t too picky about it. I would rather spend time working with my students on their writing and research and less time worrying about what is in italics or in quotes on the works cited page. Besides, I thought being too picky about citation just re-enforced the “English teacher” stereotype of being all about the stupid rules and grammar. I definitely didn’t want to be that guy.
Then a couple of things happened.
First, I started getting more picky about citation in my own writing. I think a lot of it comes from the publishing/writing experiences I have been lucky enough to have over the last 10 or 12 years. I did most of the copyediting of Invasion of the MOOCs—along with contributors (Charlie did more of the production end of things)– so that made me think a lot more about “the rules” and making sure I got at as close to correct as I could. With More Than a Moment, Utah State UP made me use Chicago Style, which was new to me as a writer, and that experience highlighted for me the differences between Chicago and the two styles I’m more used to, MLA and APA.
Second– and this is the more important reason– I started noticing how much more my first year writing students were struggling with making distinctions between different kinds of sources. They couldn’t tell the difference between a listicle website, a mainstream news source, a monthly magazine full of thought pieces, an academic article, or some guy’s website. They were frequently assuming all of their academic articles came from a journal called Elsevier or Wiley (or some other database name), everything started on page one, they couldn’t find an author’s name or an article title, and so on.
Now, maybe no one else teaching writing has noticed this, and maybe it’s just me that’s changed. But I think students are struggling with this more than they did a few years ago because all these texts are accessed almost exclusively digitally– specifically, through a web browser– and we are forgetting the distinctions between the different print “containers” in which they were originally published.
Newspapers, academic journals, books, MSM magazines and publications of all sorts, etc., have all been available electronically for a long time of course, but I think it is increasingly rare to interact with the original print versions of texts. That’s certainly true for me. I used to receive the print version of The New Yorker, but besides the fact that the digital only version is (somewhat) less expensive, I didn’t know what to do with all those magazines. I used to get the Sunday New York Times delivered, but that’s not an option in our new suburban neighborhood. It’s just as well; about 90% of the time, the paper went from the driveway to the coffee table to the recycling bin without ever being unwrapped.
In other words, it is perhaps no wonder that a lot of my students seem to think that “everything” is a website because, well, everything is a website (sort of) because it’s all the same window in Chrome (or whatever browser). So one of the reasons why I spend more time on citation practices nowadays is to teach them to recognize different kinds of texts– that website is actually a journal article, or it’s actually a newspaper– and why understanding the difference between a title that’s underlined or one that’s in italics actually does matter, why it’s key to include links and doi numbers, and so forth. Along the way, the goal is to help students see the differences between texts that all come at them through the same browser window.
To do this, I have an assignment called the annotated bibliography. If you don’t quite get what I’m talking about or are otherwise curious, here’s a chapter from my textbook that explains it, more or less. For first year writing, I require students to have at least 20 sources– most of which they won’t actually cite in their research projects, but which they need to find in order to find “the good stuff.” Each entry needs to include a correct MLA-style citation, a brief summary (and one that students need to write themselves, of course), and a sentence about how they think this research will figure into their research project. I ask students to complete this in stages– five new sources a week– and currently, it’s a “pass/no pass” assignment: they have to successfully complete the assignment to pass the course.
Again, none of this is new. This is a very traditional assignment as part of teaching research writing as a process. I’m sure most comp/rhet people reading this are nodding and saying “well, duh” to themselves.
I will say getting more picky about MLA style is time-consuming for me and often quite difficult for my students. But I explain why I’m making them do this, we spend time in class with the details of how citations work, and I give them many opportunities to revise their entries. And I like to think that by the end of the course, my students at least understand why I made them do all this.
But besides teaching the differences between different kinds of sources, this is also an assignment where AI can only help so much. Oh, they can find some sources via AI and get some help with the citation with ChatGPT (or more often, something like EasyBib), and I’m okay with that. But in order for AI to be at all helpful for this assignment, students need to have a basic understanding of how citation works. Plus they still actually have to read their research in order to quote and paraphrase from it in their writing.
For each entry on their annotated bibliographies, I insist that students provide a link or a doi number, and when I review their work (which I end up doing after every five entries, which is also why this assignment ends up being a lot of work for me), I usually check out the link to the article to make sure it’s real and that they aren’t just copying the abstract– and also to help them with the mistakes they inevitably make, especially for the first 10 or so entries. And of course, that required sentence explaining how the student might use this entry in their research is really not something an AI can do well at all.
Again, all of this goes back to the basics of teaching writing as a process: AI just can’t complete these kinds of scaffolded assignments where students are required to show their work. Granted, this takes more time and work for both students and teachers than just assigning writing as a product, but just assigning some kind of paper has never been all that effective anyway.