Receiving 15 student inquiries about citations in two weeks drives me to despair.
The technicalities of citation style have emerged for students as a prime concern: Students require reassurance and instruction on where to put a period or a quotation mark, how to cite a quote within an interview within a book, or the amount of margin space appropriate for a heading.
I do not blame them for their concern. I do blame the way we teach style guides, whether MLA or APA or Turabian or otherwise: as a collection of at-times maddeningly opaque rules that, to students, seem solely designed to satisfy the whims of the academy.
But we don’t have to continue in this manner. AI can provide not only a way out, but also an opportunity to reconceptualize the way we teach citation style more generally.
Defined by the Modern Language Association as “a set of standards for writing and documentation used by writers to find and evaluate information,” style guides promise consistency and structure, a coherent orientation to research. Yet as a general rule, students experience style as a practice of bewildering inconsistency.
Consider in-text citations in MLA and American Psychological Association style. MLA citations follow an author-page format; APA follows author-date. Reference pages, headers and even title pages require different formatting between style systems. And even within a single style guide, new editions introduce iterative changes over time.
For students switching citation styles between courses or even trying to remain within one style system, keeping track of the mechanics can prove frustrating. In the introduction to the APA seventh edition in 2019, students were encouraged to contact their institution or professor about which version of the style guide to use, with dual use of the sixth and seventh editions in place from 2019 through 2021. Students using RefWorks to create a bibliography can currently choose from among 15 bewildering versions of APA style and 10 for MLA—almost assuredly without fully understanding the iterative differences between each.
Little wonder that the Purdue Online Writing Lab—that bastion of style sanity both for the beleaguered professoriate and overwhelmed students—remains one of the most-used educational sites in the world, with its citation style pages receiving the most visits. And yet in spite of this resource and a slew of others, including websites like Citation Machine that promise easy style formatting, students continue to struggle.
In this milieu, style guides can begin to seem a bit silly. Inconsequential, even: an exercise in mechanics and parentheticals, or a game in which scholarship, as Aimée Morrison writes in Composition Studies, becomes perceived as nothing more valuable than “an error-free response to a prompt.”
This is dangerous thinking.
Academic integrity matters. Entering the scholarly conversation and attributing work properly matters. Style serves as more than a mechanical exercise. At its best, style facilitates a way of thinking and being in scholarship, supporting scholars to orient themselves within the broader academy.
In a long-ago literature class that I taught at Ohio University, one of my students asked a question that has remained with me ever since: “What even is the MLA?”
Having paid my substantive dues, both literal and figurative, to that organization for the bulk of my professional career, it never occurred to me that students might not know. But the majority of them were astonished to realize the MLA and the APA were actual organizations made of real human beings, with missions and philosophies informing the style rules that governed their essays.
This revelation transformed the students’ relationship to citation style. They stopped focusing on the mechanical trivia and instead peppered me with questions, including one that opened up a week’s worth of class discussions: Why does APA focus on year of research while MLA focuses on author?
That wasn’t the only inquiry. They wanted to know why Chicago used so many footnotes, how citation styles impacted readability, why MLA doesn’t require a title page and what these styles expressed about expectations in their field.
In short: Everyone makes us cite our work, but on what principles do these expectations operate?
The resulting discussions established an unexpected understanding among my students of how citation style should function and how all those seemingly random mechanics of various style systems actually emerge from deep, intentional thinking about research and the scholarly record. The practice of viewing citation style as a matter of scholarly identity and orientation, rather than as a series of mythological labors in the name of Real Scholarship, made a critical difference to their approach.
I was pleased to see that my undergraduate students emerged from that term with far better papers. They cited their research well and with enthusiasm; they evaluated and integrated sources with mastery; their postpaper reflections evidenced a scholarly joy that I see all too rarely in the classroom. I had the sense that, for the first time, many of them understood why they were doing what they were doing.
Yes, I still had to correct the periods in their parentheticals and the lack of italics in bibliographies at the end of the term. But that experience led me to realize that mechanics aren’t the critical aspects of style that students need to understand—and that AI can serve as a great remedy for these errors.
If citation style is about more than arbitrary mechanics, if it is about more than jumping through grammatical and technical hoops to prove mastery, then allowing AI to pinch-hit frees students to shift their focus from granular details to the intricacies of evaluating sources, thinking through if and how to cite a work, and embedding their own research and voice in a broader scholarly tradition.
Indeed, students already rely on websites and applications to mechanically format their bibliographic citations. An AI editor can surely serve as a similar supplement to adjust minor mechanics where needed: a period here, a missing parenthesis there, the addition or deletion of italics, indentations.
This neither releases students from the burden of expertise nor opens a Pandora’s box of AI use. Gating AI use in this way emphasizes the value of the writing and revising process, as well as offering students the opportunity to engage AI as thoughtful scholars. As a benefit, students learn in a low-stakes way to engage AI thoughtfully, a critical skill in the workforce.
Most importantly, students and professors with this safety net can breathe a little easier. Freed from the panic of formatting citations, students can focus on the issues that matter the most and polish a final project to a high standard. Revision transforms, too, from “a checklist of corrections that must be taken in” to useful, in-depth prompts that promote writing craft and deep inquiry. And faculty can offer high-quality feedback on content, tone and the scholarly approach rather than spend hours correcting the fine details of a bibliography.
At their best, style guides serve as a reflection of scholarly value. To write in APA style, MLA or Chicago, or even the dreaded “house style” used by some journals or publications, makes a statement about what a discipline or a publication prioritizes: what they deem worthy of inclusion or neglect, what constitutes readability and what matters to the academic record.
To focus only on minutiae runs the risk of dismissing those rich and complex concepts. Better by far to invite students into this academic conversation, elaborating on the distinctions and philosophies of practice inherent in the way we cite literature, than to represent citation style as an arbitrary practice of rote and meaningless work. AI can expedite this process and facilitate this work in a way that is of great value both to students and to faculty.
So please, bookmark the Purdue Owl website. Dog-ear the relevant pages in the necessary handbook or style guide of choice. Feel free to inculcate a style pet peeve, or to long for the earlier style guide edition now lost to time. But if institutional approach permits, take advantage of the relative freedom that AI can offer to break away from the granular focus on details to a broader and more integrated view of how and why citation style matters—even, and especially, when we can’t remember where the period goes.