Citing sources rant

[Uhura]

To me, the very idea of citing sources is puzzling to me.

So, I need to back up my essay...with someone elses essay, who backed their essay up with someone elses essay...y'see the issue here?

It feels like such a deep empthasis on finding sources for your information punishes people for trying to think of new ideas. I feel there should be more credit for that. Sure, good research makes things more solid, but if we force people to rely on old ideas, we'll never end up with any new ones breaking through.

What I found really frustrating in college was that you HAD to cite a certain amount of sources.
If you did all the research, all the experiments, everything yourself and wrote an essay based on that, you failed because the there weren't any citations in it (didn't matter how good the essay was).

The point of academic writing is to build on the already existing body of knowledge instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again. If you don't do any research you won't know if the things you write about have been researched before or if your ideas are actually "new" or not. Also, I don't see how it's possible to write a good academic essay without referencing to any earlier research or theories.