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

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!)