The worst part about writing a research paper for me is not the finding, it’s not the writing, and it’s not the revising.  It’s the citations.  Over the course of my school career, I’ve written maybe 5 papers that have required full, properly formated bibliographies and I’ve been asked to cite things about 25 different ways.  It makes sense that there’s no “gold standard” for citations.  Lawyers use Bluebook. Other people use Chicago or APA, all of which are good depending on your topic and the types of sources you have.  My school uses MLA.

MLA is a relatively easy format that’s well suited for most research papers my classmates are working on.  There are plenty of ways to cite web pages, encyclopedia articles, books of every type, but those are all secondary sources.  We had to find some primary sources, but most people found letters or journals in book form somewhere.  MLA is just a bad format for what I’m trying to do for two reasons.

1. I am using all primary sources.  I consulted some secondary sources for ideas as to where to look, but I didn’t include any secondary sources in my paper.
2. My paper uses legal sources.  All of my citations sources fall into these categories: Court decisions, legal memos about signing statements, active legislation, statutes, and signing statements themselves.  Signing statements appear in the Federal Register, but MLA offers no guidance on how to cite government publications or memos.

MLA says that their format is most used for “writing on language and literature.”  I wish they had stayed to that statement.

For one of my sources, I used a Supreme Court case.  The information that’s helpful for finding a case is the court it was decided in, the volume where the decision can be found, and the page the decision starts on.  I can then go into any library and find it.  MLA’s method of citation for court cases was created by people who are brain dead.  Here’s an example  (I apologize that this doesn’t have a hanging indent):

United States of America v. George Story and Curtis Jones. No. 89-1239. United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. 8 December 1989.

The only problem is that you can’t find a court case with just a number.  The number is only helpful if you have a tool like Lexis Nexis (or maybe Google in some cases) to find the case.  No lawyer would ever cite something like that because no library has their cases arranged by number.  That is why lawyers use Bluebook.  Here’s an example:

USA v. Story and Jones, 891 F.2d 988 (2nd Circ. Dec. 8, 1989).

Much simpler.

So unless somebody wants to come up with a super citation format that unifies everybody under one big happy citation format, people should be allowed to use the citation that works best for the type of writing that they’re doing.

I have to constantly remind myself that the point of a citation is to help somebody find one of my sources.  MLA seems to think that the point is to drive people crazy with commas and periods and citations that aren’t the least bit useful.

My wisdom of the day is this: There is no reason why each individual writing a paper shouldn’t choose a different citation format.  There are different formats for a reason!  Different formats for different things.  My other piece of wisdom is that MLA is awful for legal citations.  Really awful.  It doesn’t offer guidance for a lot of important things, so I had to creatively make up new citations that roughly follow MLA along with my teacher.

If any of you are interested in reading my paper, I will post it once it’s graded and I make corrections based on the grade.