Productivity!

[icepixie]

Ways to know you've taken your digestion metaphor too far:"These non-English British people will not go quietly into that good colon."

*headdesk* Yeah, I'll be deleting that before I turn it in. Right now it's going to sit there and amuse me.

(I have roughly fifteen pages done! I say roughly because I'm writing it in single-space, and I've hit the middle of page eight, but I have some set-off quotes that won't be double-spaced once I switch it. And I also have one section on Glendower that's basically a collection of bullet points rather than actual paragraphs, but anyway. Fifteen pages! I think I'll need five to seven more to finish it up, which I should totally be able to do today and tomorrow. WIN.)

Comments

[alto2.livejournal.com]

While I'm sorry to have left you with the same "OMG I KNOW NOTHING WTF HOW HAVE I BEEN WRONG ALL THIS TIME????" feeling, I'm thrilled to bits to know that I'm not the only one. I am starting to think that someone went back in time and changed all the books on us as a cruel trick, frankly. (I personally don't intend to change any time soon, since many of my 3-page papers would have been 4 or more if I double-spaced my quotes. And since no one has said anything, why change now??)

(Also, to clarify, you definitely bring it in half an inch on the left. I also do it on the right, though, which is apparently not the way you're supposed to do it. Go figure. As Mike--the other teacher on my hall--said, he prefers it indented on both sides because it's a clearer visual cue. Alas, they did not ask us...)

[icepixie]

I am starting to think that someone went back in time and changed all the books on us as a cruel trick, frankly.

I wonder if it's a common trick for high school and lower-level college course teachers to tell their students to single space long quotations to avoid having them take up half the paper with quotes, because you know the brats would do it if you gave them half a chance.

(It's a sad commentary on my life that I now think of so many things in terms of "how freshmen would screw it up.")

I also prefer an indent on the right as well as left, but I was never taught to do it that way. Then again, journal articles generally do, and in theory I'm supposed to be looking forward to writing them in the near future. Of course, journal articles usually use Chicago, rather than MLA style. My undergrad education is frickin' useless. Glad I paid attention to the citation style used by the history department.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's a common trick for high school and lower-level college course teachers to tell their students to single space long quotations

If that were the case, though, my kids would be showing up with a different set of guidelines. I thought maybe I'd just misremembered the whole thing, since it's been almost 20 years since I finished high school, until I talked to Mike, and then saw your post. Go figure. Also? Wouldn't it be nice if we could all agree on one style? Even at my school, we can't, so we've got kids learning MLA in English and APA in History--because what we really, really want to do is confuse the living hell out of them (though don't get me started on HIstory at my school, which is taught like a college course no later than 10th grade--and that's assuming that it's not taught like a graduate level course. Those kids do stuff I didn't have to do in college (I'm doing my first annotated bibliography NEXT SEMESTER! These kids don't know enough to be able to evaluate a source yet, but they're expected to!). Gah.

ETA: I'd always assumed that the reason for single-spacing was to keep a quote from taking over the whole page/paper. Shows you what I know, I guess.

[icepixie]

Also? Wouldn't it be nice if we could all agree on one style?

That would be lovely. And I would like it to be Chicago style, because footnotes > everything. (What the hell is your history department doing teaching them APA? Isn't that for natural sciences?) I don't think we had to cite things in our history papers in high school...the only style I ever remember learning was MLA in senior year of English, anyway.

I recall doing annotated bibliographies starting my junior year of college. High school is definitely too soon. I wouldn't even assign my freshmen an AB right now...

[alto2.livejournal.com]

We'll have to agree to disagree on the footnotes, mostly because formatting them is a bitch and MLA is so damn much easier. I also hate reading them, being pulled out of the text for something that apparently wasn't important enough to include in the first place--which is why I wanted to throw that Susanna Clarke book clear across the room. So...yeah, not a fan. Sorry.

I think APA is for snobby people who want to look like they're smarter than everyone else/ they really are. That's the only reason I can think of for the history department to be using it.

[icepixie]

We'll have to agree to disagree on the footnotes, mostly because formatting them is a bitch and MLA is so damn much easier.

But this is the one area where Word actually helps you rather than hinders you! Footnotes are easy in Word!

I like them for several reasons:

- I don't usually care where someone got their information unless it's an unreliable source, and in peer-reviewed journals, that's pretty much not going to happen. Thus, I can skip the footnotes in a way I can't the in-line citations. If for some reason I do want to go back and see who they cited and what page the original is on, it's a lot easier to just flip through the footnotes than the whole book or article. Plus, most quotes are introduced along the lines of "As XYZ writes...," and the page number after that is so much better in a footnote than taking up space in the paper itself.

- When I'm writing papers, it's a lot easier to tell if I'm citing someone overmuch by looking back through the footnotes than combing through the entire paper looking for parenthetical citations. If I see "Ibid" too many times, then I know I'm just summarizing someone else's argument rather than synthesizing my research. MLA doesn't have that handy visual cue.

- Nine out of ten journals use some variant of Chicago, or at least footnotes. It looks so much more professional than MLA, which as far as I can tell is used almost exclusively by students.

However, endnotes are an abomination unto the LORD. None of this applies to them.

(And I have offically Thought Too Much about this issue.)

[alto2.livejournal.com]

But this is the one area where Word actually helps you rather than hinders you! Footnotes are easy in Word!

I was actually referring to Word. Unless the footnote features have improved dramatically in the last version or two, they leave QUITE a lot to be desired. I can't tell you the footnote-related nightmares I had to deal with when I was working in tech support at Princeton--stuff to be formatted for journals that just would. not. go no matter what the hell we did. That was the end of me and footnotes, like, ever.

[icepixie]

Huh. They work fine for me--easy to insert, easy to move if you swap text around, easy to delete. Word automatically renumbers whenever something is moved or deleted, which I don't think it used to do maybe six years ago. I'm not trying to do anything fancier with them, though...

[alto2.livejournal.com]

Oh, it renumbered. That was about the only damn thing it did right. Formatting the things was a beast, it would decide to cut off parts of longer footnotes, or the second one on a page, or leave a giant blank space under one so that the whole thing looked like it was done by a complete moron. And there was no way to fix it because you couldn't figure out why the hell it was doing it in the first place. That's why I just say NO.

[icepixie]

How strange. It's always worked perfectly for me over the last five years or so.