GTA Made Me Do It

"The Housers are doing the work of Tom Wolfe, creating tapestries of modern times as detailed as those of Balzac or Dickens. At least, I assume that's true. Instead of reading those guys, I've been in Liberty City stealing tanks" - Matt Selmen.

Stuff I posted on my course website, reprinted for the public good

While reading drafts, it occurred to me that no matter how hard I try, there are some messages that don't seem to be getting across. So just to make things absolutely clear ...

1. Use the spell-checker. If it puts a wiggly red line under a word, it doesn't automatically mean that the word is wrong (e.g. it will probably indicate "Mulan" as a spelling mistake) but it is worth looking carefully at it.
2. Check basic grammar. This includes things like the Simple Present tense ;-)
3. Have a title page. Look at the templates on this site. If you make your own title, put it at the top of the second page, and make sure it actually means something.
4. Don't use Wikipedia. I've said this before many times and I really don't want to have to say it again. Quoting Wikipedia says to the reader "I am so lazy, I couldn't be bothered to look further than Wikipedia."
5. Don't use sites that are just collections of student essays, like allfreeessays.com. This also makes you look lazy.
6. Use the sources in the course book. I didn't just put them there so that we'd have something to talk about in class - the essays are about the sources.
7. Cite sources properly. It is Week 12 and I am still getting just a URL as a citation for some sources. Remember that citation is a major part of your grade.

[in a later post]

Here are some other things I keep saying. Or if I didn't say them several times before, I should have done.

1. Titles of complete works (books, journals, newspapers, films, TV series) go in italics. Titles of a part of a work (chapter in a book, article in a journal, episode in a TV series) go in quotation marks. Thus in class we watched "The Deliverer", which was an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess.
2. If you quote from a film, put the film in your Works Cited page.
3. I said it is sometimes acceptable to use the first person in academic writing, especially in the introduction. That doesn't mean you can use it in every third sentence.
4. In the Simple Present tense, the third person singular takes an "-s" suffix. This means, for example, that "Beatrix fight" is not good English. Really. Look at the first chapter of any basic English textbook if you don't believe me.

CMS 2.0

Some questions I have not yet seen on the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A page:

1. What is the correct way to cite a tweet?
2. If a large part of my paper is from Wikipedia, is there a special way to format this, or should I just use a blockquote?
3. If I am quoting my Facebook home page, do I need separate citations for all of my friends' entries that appear there?
4. If the same quotation occurs in the author's Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, do I need to cite all of them or is one enough?
5. If I re-use material from one of my papers that I submitted to alllfreeessays.com, should I cite that site?