In academic writing, APA citation rules are meant to ensure clarity and credibility. But for many researchers and students, they do something else entirely: they break the writing flow, kill creative momentum, and turn scholarly work into a formatting marathon.
This essay explores the hidden cost of over-formalization in research writing. Drawing on personal experience, historical examples, and studies on the writing process, it argues that citations should be a tool — not a cage.
We’ll look at why rigid APA formatting interrupts thinking, how citation perfectionism fuels writing anxiety, and how technology could allow us to write first, format later. Because the best academic work isn’t the one with flawless parentheses — it’s the one that makes us think, question, and see the world differently.
Citing or Writing? – Why the APA Cult Disrupts Our Thinking
There are moments in writing when everything flows. One thought chases the next, one argument clicks neatly into another, and you feel almost like a musician in the middle of an improvisation. And then it happens: Crash! — a citation needs to go in. I know exactly what the study says, I know why it matters here, but the flow is gone. Instead of thinking, I’m staring at the screen wondering whether the comma goes before or after the parenthesis. APA style, 7th edition. Or is it the 8th already?
I love science, but sometimes it feels as if our obsession with citation formats has more to do with bureaucracy than with knowledge. When I’m in the middle of a flow, I want to capture ideas — not spend minutes finding the proper format for “(Smith, 2020, p. 37).” Of course, I could just drop placeholders — and I often do: “[insert XY study here].” But every time I do, I wonder why we do this to ourselves at all. Why is the academic world so fixated on formal uniformity, as if it were some kind of aesthetic religion?
The Tyranny of Standards: From Free Thought to Formal Stumbling
Don’t get me wrong: I see the point. Standardized citation styles make it easier to locate sources. They keep us from leaving claims unsupported or smuggling in other people’s ideas as our own. But honestly: do we need a system so intricate that it treats every sentence like a machine part?
Citation rules aren’t natural laws. They were invented because people wanted a common structure. Fair enough. But while some scholars a hundred years ago still formulated their footnotes almost poetically — “cf. the ingenious work of Mr. N. N., published in Leipzig, 1882” — today everything is standardized. APA is an assembly line. Every sentence is checked, every thought is pressed into a format. And heaven forbid you forget a comma — reviewers and copy editors pounce as if it were a crime against science.
But to what end? When I read an essay in which the citations are free but consistent, I still understand where the ideas come from. I don’t need to regurgitate the same five building blocks (author, year, title, publisher, DOI) in exactly the same order each time to grasp the argument. It’s about the thoughts, not the parentheses.
APA Paradox – Order or Obstacle
Scientific texts are often hard to read. Not just because the topics are complex — which they often are — but because they’re forced into a style that drains them of any vitality. Citations are a symptom: instead of flowing elegantly into the text, they break the rhythm, as if someone kept pausing the music mid-dance to fix the playlist.
And yes, there are tools that make this easier: Zotero, Citavi, EndNote. I know them all. But they don’t solve the underlying problem that the writing process itself gets interrupted by a rigid corset. Technology is a bandage, not a cure.
Science and Readability — a Contradiction?
A common argument for strict citation rules is reproducibility. Others must be able to trace exactly whose shoulders you’re standing on. True and important. But does that really require perfection down to the last comma? Real research often doesn’t begin by perfecting someone else’s bibliography; it starts with a question that pops up in everyday life, with an "aha moment", with a problem that needs solving. The academic "machine", however, often reroutes that energy into ticking off formal checklists.
Of course it makes sense to verify, replicate, and challenge other studies. But that still works if authors had their own individual citation style — as long as it’s clear and consistent. I doubt the accuracy of scientific insight hinges on a missing comma in the reference list.
The Real Crisis of Science Lies Elsewhere
Maybe that’s the real point: while we tangle ourselves up in matters of format, the truly big problems in academia loom in the background. Funding pressures, the publish-or-perish treadmill, the race for impact factors — these are the monsters that devour creativity and honest curiosity. Whether I write “(Smith 2020)” or “Smith, 2020” changes absolutely nothing about that.
It’s almost ironic: we believe that academic rigor is primarily produced by formal perfection. But it’s precisely this overregulation that keeps many researchers from thinking freely.
A Plea for a New Freedom: Citation as a Tool, Not a Cage
Imagine a scholarship in which citations function like remarks in a conversation — woven in lightly, yet still precise. “As X already noted in a 2020 study …” — and then you move on. No circus of parentheses, no fight with the template. Instead, a style that carries the content rather than suffocating it.
Technology could help us get there. We’re only a few clicks away from a universal metadata system. Imagine writing freely, without thinking about APA or Chicago, and letting a machine generate a perfectly formatted bibliography at the end — whether you referenced the book as “Author, year” or just “that study by Müller on social networks.”
Maybe that’s the future: we focus on thinking, on our actual content, and the machines handle the rest.
Conclusion: Less Citation Worship, More Thinking
I don’t want to abolish the duty to cite. It’s essential for showing where ideas come from. But we should demystify it. It’s a tool, not an end in itself. Instead of wrapping our texts in norms, we should learn again to let thoughts flow — and only afterwards, pragmatically, tuck the sources in neatly.
Perhaps there’s even a broader lesson for science here: it’s not about formatting everything perfectly, but about asking the right questions. If we lose sight of that, APA is the least of our problems. The problem thinkers never wrote, e.g. Socrates. On the roots of science and relevant thinking in this article.
Further Reading
Boice, R. (1990). Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. New Forums Press.
Daly, J. A., & Miller, M. D. (1975). The empirical development of an instrument to measure writing apprehension. Research in the Teaching of English, 9(3), 242–249.
Elbow, P. (1998). Writing Without Teachers (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 365–387.
Huerta, M., Goodson, P., Beigi, M., & Chlup, D. T. (2017). Graduate students as academic writers: Writing anxiety, self-efficacy, and emotional well-being. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 41(2), 199–216.
Kellogg, R. T. (2008). Training writing skills: A cognitive developmental perspective. Journal of Writing Research, 1(1), 1–26.
Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–172.
Pajares, F. (2003). Self-efficacy beliefs, motivation, and achievement in writing: A review of the literature. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 19(2), 139–158.
Silvia, P. J. (2007). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. American Psychological Association.
Sword, H. (2012). Stylish Academic Writing. Harvard University Press.
Torrance, M., & Galbraith, D. (2006). The processing demands of writing. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of Writing Research (pp. 67–80). Guilford Press.
Wicherts, J. M., Bakker, M., & Molenaar, D. (2011). Willingness to share research data is related to the strength of the evidence and the quality of reporting of statistical results. PLoS ONE, 6(11), e26828. (Included for its connection to transparency/reporting standards and how “formal quality” may or may not align with substantive rigor.)
Authored by Rebekka Brandt