Page 148 - Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing, 2nd Ed

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER: NARRATIVE AND STRUCTURE 13 5

basis of critical feedback on their first assignments. The Department of Media
and Information (DMI), along with some other areas of the university, takes a
different approach. DMI, in its first-year unit MCI 101: Research and
Presentation Project, directly addresses the need that students have to learn
correct referencing techniques, devoting some weeks and an assignment to that
task. Students can also practise these techniques in the assignments required in
other first-year units.
Nevertheless, even when direct attention of the kind just outlined has been
paid to referencing, some students continue to struggle with it. The problem is
not merely a technical one, since all the students at university are capable of
learning to follow the kinds of technical directions that lay out the appropriate
steps needed to reference their work. What then is the cause of this problem?
DMI would suggest that many students (including some who are quite able
referencers) remain confused about the admittedly complex set of reasons that
explain why referencing is so important in all kinds of written communication.
This paper will outline these reasons before ending with a short exploration of
why they might be hard for some students to grasp.
As just indicated, there are three main reasons why referencing is important
in essays, reports, presentations, theses, articles, and all the other kinds of
scholarly writing in which students engage both at university and then, as
graduates, in their professions. Without seeking to assign a priority to any of
them they are: first, that referencing enables a reader to seek out more infor-
mation on the topic of the written work, based on the references given; second,
referencing acknowledges authors' ethical and academic debt of thanks to those
sources which they have used to create their own 'source' of information; and
third, referencing provides a method by which authors can establish the validity
and strength of their claims by relying on the authority of the source to which
they are referring. Let us examine these reasons in more detail.
The process of effective scholarship (finding, analysing, and communicating
information) involves an almost-constant acquisition of ideas, knowledge,
views, and general contextual understanding. One method of finding the
material from which to acquire this information, used mainly at times of inten-
sive research, is to follow the leads provided in an article or book via the
references to find, quickly and with a high degree of reliability, additional
valuable, relevant sources of information. A well-constructed piece of scholarly
writing will contain both information in its own right and information that
assists readers in further information acquisition. Thus an author needs to see
referencing as a service to the reader of their work and, using the kinds of
standard methods that are available (such as the APA system), make sure readers
are easily able to go from their text to others via those references.
The second reason noted above was that authors owe a debt to those writers
who have provided them with information, inspiration, and ideas. This debt is
both scholarly and ethical. What do I mean by assigning two different aspects
to this notion of debt? Following the 'debt' metaphor through a little further, it