One Cornell sophomore has begun writing columns for them. Her first column was a look at the sorority rush process:
I decided the best way to go about this was to treat rush like another three-credit class. My roommate and I immediately began researching—we learned the Greek alphabet, we talked to guys at frat parties and girls at other schools, we trolled Facebook and Juicy Campus for more hours a day than we did our reading.Her most recent column, about caffeine usage, includes a "references" list. This is generally a good thing to do when you're writing a paper, but maybe not if your references include Wikipedia, a friend, and the barista at the local Starbucks.
References:
http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/poison/caffeine/caffeine.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Overuse
Starbucks Barista, Collegetown, Ithaca, NY
http://web.archive.org/web/20070614144016/http://www.cspinet.org/nah/caf...
Maya Guerra, Cornell University sophomore
I'm not trying to be harsh on her, but I hope that Cornell's freshman writing seminars make clear that these kinds of sources are unacceptable. Reading Wikipedia is fine, but you need to confirm the information somewhere else. If you're relying on friends or baristas for facts, you need to verify what they tell you elsewhere.
I realize that this is an online column, and not an academic paper, but it reflects poorly on the writer when the references are so laughable. As a fellow Cornell student, I hope the author knows the difference.
Does a non-academic, journalistic-style article even merit references? My copy of the New Yorker never has references.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure whether she was doing it to be cute or whether there was any intended seriousness to her citations.
ReplyDeleteFrom my own perspective, I try to include sources for any news or historical information in published blog entries. I'm not as concerned about professional guidelines, but I like to have the information to be accessible if readers want to look into it further (In early entries, I didn't know how to embed links. Then I just kept doing it as a quirk). I'm guilty of using wikipedia, but sometimes it's more convenient for a blog entry than the six or seven different sources in the wikipedia article, cited separately.
To respond to both comments...
ReplyDeleteI certainly don't think a references list is necessary for something like this, but if you're going to include one, it should be legitimate.
In my mind at least, there is a difference between including a list of links for further reading (i.e. Wikipedia) and a list of sources (baristas, friends).
The article was billed as a "column," which I think requires more formality than if it were simply a blog post, as both BC and I write.