Cite for Sore Eyes

[robinturner]

I am currently revising my book on how to write a term paper so as to bring the chapter on citation up to date with 6th edition APA and 7th edition MLA (for the benefit of non-academics: this translates as PITA). Citation formats are to academics what the technical specifications of the Enterprise are to Trekkies, i.e., vitally important to members of your group, and totally pointless to everyone else. People actually have heated arguments about whether MLA (Modern Languages Association) is better than CMS (Chicago Manual of Style), which is silly since Chicago has loads of class and MLA is the polyester leisure suit of academic style because normal people don't give a dingo's kidney about this kind of thing. After wading through the details of APA formatting for miscellaneous non-print sources, I'm starting to move from being an academic to being a normal person: I want to cross out "For an episode of a television series, use the following format" and write "For Christ's sake, they can look it up on Wikipedia like everyone else!"

Comments

[vret.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but I can't agree at all.

imdb is a better resource for that.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Maybe everyone should just put links to Amazon, then academics can at least make a few bob from click-throughs.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I must be an academic, because I have no idea what PITA means.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Pain In The Ass. Or People for Interesting Treatment of Animals.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I just wish they'd all agree among themselves. The number of times I've formatted a paper for a particular journal, then had the author come back to me saying, "They've rejected it, so we're going to submit it to this other journal instead... can you reformat it?" ...!

Macros

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Not kidding: late 80s/early 90s I wrote an OpEd piece on how "easy" software like M$ Word would stupify people. Dear old WordPerfect for DOS was so "difficult" that folk would have to learn stuff ... which meant (here's my point) that even mediocre users were writing and using macros.
You create something like a teenie perfect data base where you tuck all the salient details, then write a set of instructions on how to format them. Diff specification? Change the instructions and *Hey! Presto!* the document is reformatted.
Kinda like switching the CSS style-sheet for a wep-page ... contents remains the same, presentation changes. If that's at all meaningful.

If you do that sorta thing, it would be worth looking into. (And no, I don't know /a thing/ about Word! I use OpenOffice.)

Re: Macros

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea, but I'm not sure it would be worth implementing in my case, because the problem's the references. Most academic journals (at least in our area) do not give a dingo's kidney what the font is or whether you use bold or italic for your headings, but they do care very much about the way you style your references, and every blessed journal is different. To take one minor feature that could potentially be very difficult to implement, some journals like you to list the first three authors and then put et al (in italics or not, and with a full stop or not, according to the editor's taste); other journals prefer six names, and occasionally you get other numbers. So, if the paper gets rejected from a three-authors-et-al journal and then submitted to a six-authors-et-al journal, you have to put back in all the authors you took out to submit it the first time round.

I really wish they would all get together among themselves and decide that, right, this will be the standard format from now on. I don't particularly care what it is, just so long as it's consistent.

Re: Macros

[solri.livejournal.com]

That is why everyone should use open source bibliography database software like BibTeX and why all publishers should distribute BibTeX style files (to be fair, a lot of them do). Oh, and of couurse all word-processors should have decent BibTeX file import.

Re: Macros

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

That would rock. It would absolutely transform that part of my job!

Re: Macros

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Oh come come, good friend ...
... and next you'll be fixing things so we don't have a repeat of Katrina everytime Mother Nature drops a pot.

But seriously folks: that sort of refinement is truly the sort of thing that only OpenSource projects can be looked to for. (Yes, ugly formulation. "If I had more time I would write more concisely.") That sort of refinement appeals to so few ... what corporation is that well motivated? GMail for example ... a rather primitive interface for an impressive back-end.
Did I hear someone mutter something about "lowest common denominator"?

BTW: if you know someone with a full copy of WP5.1 for DOS, c/w manuals ... or Borland's PAL for Paradox ... those both were /glorious/ macro writing languages.
Truly. I had set up menu-driven macros that allowed engineers to create MIL-SPEC compliant documents from scratch. Plop-plop/fizz-fizz.
As lj-user="miss_next"* points out, quite rightly, there are a number of different standards. But it's a finite number. And macros are ace at handling "case" logic.

* (snicker) I can't remember syntax for LJ User!

Re: Macros

[solri.livejournal.com]

I use OpenOffice a lot (though I prefer LyX). It means I can do most things in older versions of Word, but the new GUI confuses the hell out of me. There again, it seems to confuse Word users too ;-)

Re: Macros

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Is the problem with GUI, ayup ... talk to a cog-psych friend about it sometime ... "cognitive ergonomics".
Confronted by the blank screen of WP for DOS, User knew s/he had to dig in and figure it out.
Confronted by Byzantine maze of oh-so simple menu items ... the mind boggles. End result? User is left in the grips of severe self-doubt. (I called for a class action suit against M$ when Win95 came out ... psychological abuse. Not kidding!)

But if you use Wikipedia ...

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

... then you need to cite the reference.
;-^

/me does MIL-SPEC tech_docs!