APA / MLA et. all citations

[luxe]

ahh, i can't be a linguist without knowing how to do proper citations. I realized all the essays I've been writing don't have a reference section which is criminally disingenuous from those gracious enough to share ideas before me and guess its plagiarism. that thing all teachers and librarians warned me about but i didn't care about writing then. I know all these formats have a special source of truth on how to do it-- like APA is on version 7 now. I don't care so much about being perfect on quotes and spacing and stuff, but I do care about modeling citations appropriately to support these kinds of citation formats.

More importantly the rules seem loose, and I don't like that. Do I cite just a sentence? Do I cite an entire paragraph? What if I have sentences about something I read, my sentence, and then 5 more sentences about something I read. Do I have to site 10 times because I sandwhiched by own thought in between-- or do I cite the entire paragraph thus risking the integrity of the original author by attributing something to them they did not say. Also, note, that summarizing in your own words still requires a citation. Well according to APA, YOU WOULD HAVE TO SITE EVERY SENTENCE. That's really stupid from a "flow of text" perspective, but understandable for academics and such.

There is a strategy however that everyone does. Instead of doing sentence (cite). sentence (cite). sentence (cite),

You do something like, "According to person (cite), blah blah facts. They also say blah blah thing. Thing is what is considered foo.

If you look at the words, I've bolded you can see that each sentence technically is kind of cited.
the words "things" and "they" reference back to the original citation thus avoiding the ambiguity.

This is okay, but I have a slight bone to pick here as well. In this case APA is forcing my writing style. Every letter, every sound, how the words flow together is important for the overall sentence and thus the overall paragraph, and thus reflects the style and substance of the entire work. To have APA force me to drop in these references and structure my sentences a certain way to accommodate their rules, seems artistically restrictive.

I tried to google ways around it, but people don't care or even mention it. All the people who write about APA and stuff are people who are in school (which means they don't actually care and are just doing what is done to get a good grade) and researchers, (which means they don't actually care and just want to convey information concisely with no personality... and in some cases probably welcome the citation bloat into their work because citations are linguistic currency to them or something for the validity of their abstract).

For starters, and for what I think will be sufficient for me moving forward is "unilang citation tokens" for sentences and paragraphs.

1. A sentence can have 0 or more citations
2. A paragraph can have 0 or more citations

If every sentence in a paragraph has the same citation, it is equivalent to the paragraph having the citation and the sentences having no citations.

This will work fine. Citations can be automatically embeded on to the end of sentences appropriately, and probably automatically appended into the start of paragraphs (if lucky).

Citation information itself. Title, Author(s), Date, publication, page number, video timestamp, all that stuff can exist as a global unilang object (which will correlate to .bib files) and a chosen identifier will be used for appending it to sentences / paragraphs.

Code it up!

[luxe]

good framework for this in place