Citation Madness

Classes are over and papers finally graded. My head has finally stopped pounding from pouring over their badly formed citations--if they even remembered to include their "Works Cited" pages. Once again, I question the Sisyphean effort of teaching proper documentation of sources and citation format, the weeks spent examining MLA or APA styles, the endless drills about the information to be included, the where's and why's and when's of periods and commas and colons, underscores or italicization. Yet relief is on its way, and no, it's not Advil, but two new web sites, designed to create downloadable and Word-compatible bibliographies: BibMe and EasyBib. Both sites include the ability to save and categorize your entries, so you can have a separate list for each paper you are writing, and both sites provide general documentation information for each system. While I'll stick with Zotero (it sits in my favorite browser, Firefox, and adds things with a simple click of a button), these two sites should prove helpful to students in all disciplines.