system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:  Why does proper APA / MLA citation matter so much?

I'm in grad school and I have an entire book on APA citation. In a world with search engines, it seems like citing something so that finding it is easily should be much, much simpler than this crap.

EDIT:  I should clarify, I'm not having any issue with actually doing these citations, I just find the level of rigor in their structure a bit over-specific.  "Oh, there are 5 authors?  List them like this.  There are 6 authors?  Do something different.
gpt
It's not that that *format* matters. It's that being consistent matters. Everybody wants citations to occupy as little space on the page as possible, and that means making them as compact as possible. Because they're written in a really compact form, they're really hard to understand unless you know the format … and that requires that everyone be consistent with the format.

In other words, it all boils down to economics. Compact, consistent citations save ink, paper, time and money.