Page 538 - Wordsmith A Guide to College Writing

sources. Failure to do so is called plagiarism and is considered
cheating. But the use of documentation styles goes beyond the need

to avoid plagiarism. Documentation styles have their own methods of

formatting, titling, and spacing.

The driving force behind documentation styles is the need for

consistency. If a journal or other publication in, for instance, the field of
economics receives ten papers to be reviewed for publication, it is

important that those papers all be in the same format and use the

same method of documenting sources. That way, editors (and later

on, readers) will be able to quickly locate the citations rather than get

bogged down because one author used in-text citations and another

used footnotes. They can direct their focus to the content of the
papers. In the same way, by requiring you to use a particular format

for your papers, your professors are ensuring that style remains a

background issue and content occupies the foreground.

In addition, when your instructors require you to use a particular style
or format, they are preparing you for a time when you might be a

writer in a particular field yourself and be required to use those styles.

At the very least, your instructors are preparing you for a time when

you will be required to adapt your writing to a particular style or format

used in your workplace. Every workplace has a format for writing
memos, letters, and reports. Again, consistency keeps the focus on

the content of those documents. In addition, just as academic writing

has certain conventions that must be followed, workplaces, too, have

particular writing styles. A police report would never say, “The low-

down slimeball tried to get away from me, so I grabbed the sucker and