Other Teachers Will Understand

I had complained to the Critical Reasoning and Writing class during the next-to-last week of summer school that they weren't doing a particularly good job of introducing the material they were using from outside sources. I was getting parenthetical citations with last names and little else, and I suggested that readers needed to have the ability to judge the credibility of the sources in an essay by knowing something more about the sources than just the author's last name. We even had a little practice during classtime to remind them of this skill that they should have either developed or honed in their College Writing classes.

I took up a set of essays a day or two later. I was hopeful that some of them would have noted my frustration from our in-class discussion. Many of them had done a better job, to be honest. However, while I was reading and grading them over the weekend, I came across this particularly egregious example of how some people just never seem to know when to quit:

"In an essay in The Civil Mind compiled by Margaret Early Whitt and Janet L. Bland called 'A New Campus Crusade' by Keith Naughton, Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan, proposed a new process in choosing prospective students for the university."

How much of that do you really need to know at that particular moment in the essay itself and how much of it could be saved for the Works Cited list where it would look just a tiny bit less...well, clunky and ham-handed? At least, the student was consistent. Every single source was introduced by giving the author's name and the title of the article and where it was located. Probably one-eighth of the essay or so was taken up with these kinds of introductions (and they weren't even saved for only the first reference in the paper either. No, they had to reappear every single time that same source was used.) Thankfully, the student saved the date of publication and the type of source (Print, Web, etc.) for the Works Cited list.

Of course, I marked his grade down on that particular element, and I'm certain he was very disappointed and perhaps even angry. He had actually been one of the few who had done the citations (mostly) correctly for the first essay, but I guess the ones who really don't need the help often think that they aren't doing enough to demonstrate that they "get it."