"It's pretty astonishing, given that most of the Chronicle's readers are probably academics of one stripe or another, how many people responding in these comments have completely misunderstood the article. It's not saying we shouldn't teach our students to cite things properly. Rather, it's saying that citation FORMAT needn't be as high a priority as the author thinks it usually is (whether he's right or not is naother question). The point is, we should expend more pedagogical energy on getting students to read attentively and thoughtfully than on getting them to follow some precise formatting checklist. What's ironic is that the people taking issue with the article and defending precise attention to citation format seem to be making exactly the mistake the author decries in student writing, i.e., obsessively focusing on mechanics but failing to comprehend the real point of the argument." - Nathan Rein