The Samantha Fulnecky essay? made me realize i have no idea how to cite sources

[ThomasCher]

I'm gonna be brutally honest here. When I first heard about the "Samantha Fulnecky essay?" controversy blowing up on Twitter and Fox News, I immediately jumped on the bandwagon. I was like, "Yeah! Another Christian student getting silenced by the radical left! This is terrible!" I shared the Turning Point USA post, I commented some fire emojis, the whole deal.

But then... I actually read the essay. Like, really read it. And guys? I'm confused now.

Here's the thing: I'm also a Christian. I also believe in traditional gender roles. But I'm also a psychology major, and I've written like fifty million essays for my classes. And I don't think I've ever written one without citing a single academic source. Like, not one. The assignment was to respond to a specific research article about gender typicality in middle schoolers. Samantha's essay doesn't mention that article at all. Not once. She talks about God and demons and society, which is fine for her beliefs, but she literally didn't do what the prompt asked .

I showed the essay to my TA during office hours (anonymously, because I didn't want to look dumb), and she was like, "Yeah, this would get a zero in any of my classes too. You can't just ignore the reading material and write whatever you want." She pointed out that there were grammar issues too, and that Samantha used zero citations for anything .

So now I'm sitting here questioning everything. Was I wrong to support her? Is this actually religious discrimination, or is it just a student who didn't follow instructions getting a bad grade? The instructor literally wrote that she wasn't deducting points for beliefs, but because the paper "does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive" . That seems... reasonable?

I don't know anymore. This whole thing has made me paranoid about my own essays. Like, am I citing enough? Am I actually answering the prompt? What even counts as empirical evidence? I thought I knew how to write papers, but now I'm second-guessing everything. Has anyone else had this crisis? Like, maybe we should all be more careful about actually reading assignments before we get outraged?

 

[MaverickJ]

Thomas, the fact that you're questioning your initial reaction shows you're actually maturing. That’s rare on the internet.

Look, you can believe in God and cite peer-reviewed journals. They aren't mutually exclusive. The problem with that essay wasn't the Christianity; it was the academic malpractice. You can't walk into a physics exam and answer with Bible verses and expect an A, right? Same logic applies here.

You're probably fine with your own writing if you're this worried about it. The panic means you care. Just make sure you're actually doing the readings before you write. And yes, 50 million essays in psych means you should have citations every few sentences. If you don't, you're just writing a blog post, not a paper.