Citation is something that causes me a lot of distress. As I understand it, our writing should be peppered with many citations throughout. This lends a sense of legitimacy to what we are saying – we have looked at books! it must be valid and worthwhile. These citations should be diverse, showing that we have put in the hours and research, not simply drawing from the first author we come across. The citations must follow the Harvard standard, as these boffins who have gone to one of the most elite schools on the planet surely must be the gold standard of citation.
Why does this bother me?
1.
For a short course, there is only so much time I can dedicate to reading each week. Let’s say I read for 4 hours per week. This is ambitious because this doesn’t include the time I need to put into actually creating my project, blogging, reading Moodle, checking emails, so on and so forth. Realistically 4 hours is too much for a course that is 1 unit, once a week. So what is the real amount of reading that I should be expected to put? I find this vague and frustrating because I don’t have clarity here.
2.
Reading for me is very slow. With ADHD, it’s difficult to focus for very long, and I often need to re-read pages several times. Sometimes I can use assistive technology to help, but not when the E-Books are in the format that they are through ProQuest – which the library offers. In the more realistic 2 hours a week I could put into reading – I can cover little ground.
3.
I don’t do skim reading. Everyone I talk to says things like “you don’t read the whole thing you just skim and find the important bits.” No, that’s what you do… this doesn’t really work for me. I can’t really skim read. If I’m skimming, I’m understanding and absorbing nothing, and I am not really learning. It’s a waste of time and it serves only to signal that I am a legitimate academic and my writing is worthwhile because it matches the expected conventions. Who cares that I learned very little during this exercise? Well, I do. If I am to find a subject that interests me and have to learn about that topic, I want to do it right. I want to invest and immerse myself in this, and this takes a lot of time, and may not efficiently yield citations or quotes for my document. If I find a book (like I did tonight – Drawing Autism – Jill Mullin) that is really beautiful and is speaking to me and teaching me about myself and causing a quite emotional and moving feeling of beauty – do I just move on because I only have a few hours and I need X number of quotes in my writing? Is that really what we want from people? For them not to feel moved and gripped and follow their passion?
4.
The formatting of the citations confuses me. There are websites that will fill it out for you, I can hear you thinking. Well, those websites are confusing as shit. What if it’s a magazine excerpt in an article and it’s being quoted on a blog? I don’t know how to handle this situation and it causes me a lot of stress and worry. But Harvard said it’s right! Fuck Harvard, honestly. Those people don’t give two shits about me and my neurodiversity, and how it made school hell for me and my grades sucked, and therefore applying to their elitist privileged cult can get fucked. Their recruitment is not inclusive and their smug air of superiority makes me sick. Why can’t I just write it my own way? Is the point of writing not to communicate and be understood. If I can write “This came from a blog I read at this website “copy paste here”” does that not clearly communicate where the information came from? What if the book had 3 authors? Why aren’t we putting all of their names? How do I choose one and give them more credit than the others? I can’t stand it.
5.
I am not an academic. I am an artist. I studied Animation because I liked to draw pretty pictures. I teach animation because I know how to do it and other people want to do it, and I’m patient, and I convinced some more qualified people than me that I was able to teach it so they let me. And they let me because I had some experience doing it which was probably because they just needed somebody to run a class once and couldn’t find anybody, and I am a privileged white nerdy male who wears glasses and probably got given more trust than I deserved. And now I know that I am also neurodiverse (apparently this isn’t a word according to myBlog – goddamn red squiggly line GRRRR) and shit like citations makes me want to cry. I don’t really see why I need to come across as an elite academic for my opinion and words to have validity.
6.
My work isn’t being published, and you don’t have time to check my citations.
As you can probably see I am writing this from a place of rage and frustration, because I should be excited to study and learn and grow as a person, but citations have me feeling like I don’t belong here and that I want out, and that’s pretty shitty. And if I feel this way, I can’t be alone. At least I am studying for a teaching certification which is academia and must be held to some kind of standard, but why the hell am I making my students who are studying to become animators do citations that I really don’t have time to authenticate?
Leave a Reply