Life is like an analogy...

If you're anything like me, you've gone to college and, at one point during your time in college, had to write a paper using Modern Language Association (MLA) formatting. And I'll bet you half your college tuition that you can't remember how to cite a single item in a Works Cited page off the top of your head right now. No, no — don't go look it up. It's totally fine. In fact, I can tell you off the top of my head now how to cite a single basic book. I know because I did it the other day at work:

Author Last Name, Author First Name. _Title_. Publishing Co. City: Publishing Co., Year published. Page numbers, if applicable.

...And that is the extent of my offhand MLA knowledge.

That's the thing: we can't remember because we shouldn't have to remember because the whole concept of Works Cited/References/Bibliographies is pretty much useless outside of academia and research. And if you're in one of those fields, you will constantly have access to guides that will tell you how to cite whatever it is that you need to cite.

So why should you have to remember?

Furthermore, even if you tried to remember, you would probably FAIL because MLA is just one of several citation formats. The American Psychology Association decided that, for some reason, the MLA wasn't good enough for them and made their own citation format (APA) that's used by some of the social and hard sciences — except for sociology which has its own format (ASA).

So while MLA would cite one of my Theory of Teaching books this way:
Rafoth, Ben, ed. _A Tutor's Guide: Helping Writers One to One_. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2005.

The APA would cite it this way:

Rafoth, Ben (ed.). (2005). A tutor's guide: Helping writers one to one (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.

You see the difference? Yeah, me either.

Then the University of Chicago decided neither one of the previous formats did their anthro and and history writers justice and wrote the Chicago Manual of Style — which has two different systems within its one format: the humanities system and the author-date system. Plus, Chicago says you can cite one text in various ways depending on what you're doing. An example (and a link for reference):

• Note: 1. Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 65.
• Bibliography: Doniger, Wendy. Splitting the Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
• In-text citation: (Doniger 1999, 65)
• Reference list: Doniger, Wendy. 1999. Splitting the difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I am not making this up.

It's just so goddamn arbitrary — and why in the world do we, as academics and researchers, need at least five different citation systems? Doesn't one appropriately convey the information needed for citation? I mean, they all seem to cover the same material.

And as a result of puzzling over this for at least 45 minutes with my Theory of Teaching class last week, I decided to invent my own manual of citation. I mean, associations and universities seem to not care one way or the other if an adequate system already exists so why should I?

Here — for the first time ever published — are the Bartlett Citation Manual rules:

List the items below in your citation in order of the list given here. Put a smiley-face emoticon between each item except for the author name — you should put an exclamation mark after the author's name.

• Alphabetize by year
• In the title, capitalize verbs and prepositions only
• Italicize and underline the title
• For articles, list the article title in backwards word order in parentheses.
  
• For author's names list by middle initial; then first name; then last name (using the semi-colons as shown). If the author's middle initial is not available, choose a random letter and assign it to the author
• For subsequent authors and/or editors, include a clever nickname in quotation marks between the first and last name. If the person is an editor add the word "King" to the nickname
  
• Underline the publishing city
• Italicize the publishing company
• If there are multiple cities where the company has a publishing house, list them all
  
• For each edition, write the phrase "Up-To-Date" and then list the year
• List the square root of the page numbers
• Grade the book's usefulness on an A to F scale.

So taking an article from the same book I cited twice earlier, one should write a Bartlett citation like this:

2005 :) (Key the is Focus: Ideas Organizing) L.; Alice; Trupe! _A tutor's guide: Helping writers one To one_ :) Ben "King Raftastic" Rafoth :) _Portsmouth, NH_ :) Boynton/Cook :) Up-To-Date 2005 :) 13.190906 :) B+ :)

Simple enough, right?
Right?


Addendum: I would have posted this last week right after the class discussed it but it took me so long to actually cite something using those old systems that I had to take a week-long break and then come back. Thank God for the Bartlett Citation Manual!

Labels: articles, books, college, conundrums, FAIL, grad school, hypothetically, parody