Citation formats such as APA and MLA kill creativity and encourage robotic behavior. Let's think about it for a minute. What are formats like APA and MLA made up of? They tell you where to put a dot. They tell you where to have how many spaces. They tell you where to put the year the book was published. And if you get any of this slightly wrong, you're screwed!

This rigid concept of citing sources is an utter waste of time--so much so that few professors actually enforce this. Increasingly professors tell you that they don't care how you cite. "Just put where you're getting your stuff from" many professors tell classes. 

But there is one professor this semester who is anal sensitive about MLA format. A space off or a missing dot can take away five points from your grade. It leads me to wonder why. Why do we need MLA and  APA and such BS like that?

I like to play devil's advocate any time I want to argue against something. So I will do the same here. I'm thinking that in scientific articles, where dozens if not hundreds of sources are cited, it might help to use the formatting to communicate different things. For example, an underlined title of a book at the beginning could be established to mean a certain type of journal. Fair enough except for two things:

• Most college students are not writing scientific papers. We write few pages at a time. When we are told to use MLA format, we often spend more time figuring out the format than actually reading that book and using it as a source.
• If the goal of the formats is to communicate something, it's not working! There has got to be a better way to communicate that this source is a journal that is named ___ and is published in the year ____. Heck, even writing a couple lines in natural language about a source would be way more readable than the awkward nitpicky crappy formats such as the APA and MLA.