Go To Hell Footnote
I just finished my first paper I had to write for school. I have to say it was a rather time-consuming experience. How long did it take me to write a 4 page paper? Answer: 10 hours.
How this happened in light of my mad blogging skills is no mystery. The actual content of the paper took about an hour an a half to write—about how long it would take me to put together a post of that length, links and all. The problem was that I had to meet a scholarly standard. Here’s what I mean:
When citing a commentary you must first footnote it like so (10 point type, single spaced, then a space between each proceeding footnote):
18 Claus Westermann, Genesis 12–36 (trans. John J. Scullion; CC; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 25.
Then you must write it up in a bibliography:
Westermann, Claus. Genesis 12–36. Translated by John J. Scullion. Continental Commentaries. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995.
Ah yes, that isn’t superfluous at all. And no I will not be drawn into the irony of figuring out how to indent properly with this primitive HTML based text editor. Hooray for periods. Add to that a title page and a page numbering system that doesn’t work well in MS Word and you have a few dead laptop batteries on your hand.
The sad thing is I completely forgot what I wrote about. This, I believe, is the college experience—you absorb nothing you read or write about because half of your grade rides upon how well you cross your “I’s” and dot your “T’s.” Well, I should say that is my experience. Most people just get drunk and party.
By the way, how do you cite an article from an edited volume in the SBL format? My incredibly unhelpful $50 style-handbook didn’t know that one.
September 19th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Would it be unkind of me to note that if you have a bunch of mandatory junk like footnotes and bibliographies, then the professor has a totally objective standard to measure against and doesn’t have to actually think about the real content of what you wrote?
September 19th, 2006 at 9:54 am
That is a good theory. When I become a professor that is exactly what I am going to do.
September 19th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Good for you. Not a tradition that should fall by the wayside.
September 19th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Try writing a 136 page masters thesis in Word… the page numbering and citations… not to mention trying to insert the dozens of figures… man I just get pissed off thinking about it, even though I finished it 4 months ago. Somehow, Word decides along the way to autoformat, well, everything, because it knows what you want to do better than you do. It’s one of those things that you know the best, so it made sense to use, but it just makes you so angry. It’s sort of like the abused girlfriend who keeps going back to the man that beats her because she’s too afraid of being alone. We should TP Bill Gates’ house.
Oh, and I realized early on that college was never about understanding, which makes me think college is kind of a waste of time. But at least we all know how to cite correctly.
September 19th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
Citation is #2 on the bane of my existence list. Multiple mutually exclusive standards for every different course, often differeing slightly from actual standards like APA, Chicago, MLA, Scientific, etc.
September 25th, 2006 at 9:39 am
It’s been ages since I’ve had to do citation stuff. I was curious if any of the free citation programs are any good.