A homily on APA citation style

I’ve been doing some work lately using the APA citation style, and I hate every moment of it.

This may seem like an exaggeration—after all, it’s just a citation style. It’s purely a means of conveying information. So long as all the same information gets across, the difference between one style and another is purely cosmetic. Of course you might prefer one over the other, but it seems needlessly petty to hate a citation style.

So what is my beef with the APA? To name a few things:

Citations are in-text. This always makes a document messy and difficult to read. APA style says that with anything up to and including five authors, you need to list all of them on the in-text citation. This makes huge breaks in the flow of text, which translates to huge gaps in the flow of thought. And, let’s face it: lots of academics have funny names. It’s distracting.

Another name-related problem: the APA style emphasizes authors’ names and de-emphasizes titles. This means that something like “(Prendergast, van Schmuijens, and Koop, 2006)” is meant to stand in for “A Retrospective Study of Data Collection by Mental Health Organizations” (no page numbers, of course, that would be gauche). How do you remember that “Prendergast, van Schmuijens, and Koop” is supposed to stand for that? Because you’re an academic and you’re friends with Prendergast, van Smuijens, and Koop. Anyone who doesn’t go to the right cocktail parties is at a severe disadvantage in reading these articles. This feature of APA style so effectively promotes academics’ careers at the expense of communication that you have to think they designed it that way on purpose.

By way of contrast, my own field (music) uses the “whichever one you happen to like the best” style guide, so I’ve always used Chicago. Citations in Chicago are typically done in footnotes (they can be in-text, but in practice they’re usually footnotes or endnotes). The footnotes constitute a parallel text to the main text that can contain parenthetical expansions, directions to further reading, anecdotes, and jokes. This means that the main text stays uncluttered, and that authors are encouraged to expand upon their citations. Titles and page numbers are given for every citation.

This is not just an issue of cosmetics or even the availability of information. It constitutes a totally different way of thinking about references. To use computer analogies, the Chicago method construes references as hyperlinks: they direct you somewhere you can find more information or verify what has just been said. It allows the author to qualify or comment on the value of a source. Thus, it demands acknowledgment up front that you are reading a text that can be criticized, and it directs you to other texts that can be criticized.

On the other hand, APA treats citations as “includes”. A computer program has just one continuous effective text, but this text tends to be broken up through several different files and copied automatically into the main stream of text as needed. A computer can do this. A person cannot. The rhetoric of the social sciences treats “(Prendergast, van Schmuijens, and Koop, 2006)” not as a direction to read the corresponding study, but as a shorthand that straightforwardly copies the chunk of knowledge that study represents into the present context. It glosses over the fact that this may not always be possible or even desirable. Moreover, it glosses over the fact that the source may not actually say what the present author claims it does.

Fundamentally, APA citation is dishonest, in exactly the same ways that the field of psychology is dishonest. I’m not OK with that.

Demon’s Souls: The Bane of My Existence

I never did quite get the NPCs in Demon’s Souls. For one thing, the world is supposed to have been taken over by the demons, and yet there are a surprising number of non-demonic people kicking around. You see them in the loading montages long before you meet them in the game, and this gives them an aura of mystery. This is intensified by the fact that the characters are all photographed from bizarre angles that distort their proportions, and some weirdness about character names (“Blacksmith Ed and Boldwin”, “Patches the Hyena”). Some of them are friendly and some of them are hostile, and it’s not always the same ones. You never know on approaching them.

Some of them seem to be completely superfluous—the apprentices, for example—and only serve to crowd up the Nexus, weaken the siege mentality, and make the player character seem even more insignificant than they already do. Some of them have a specific role but it’s not clear how you would discover this if the Demon’s Souls wiki didn’t exist, as must have been the case at one time in history. In general the NPCs tend to wander around the world, appearing seemingly at random. Their paths are predetermined, of course, but they are predetermined according to a set of rules that is mind-bogglingly complex and never adequately explained: World Tendency.