Thursday, September 15, 2011

MLA, eat your heart out.

Current book: None
Pages read: None

My book has not yet been returned to the library. Come on, random person. You have like $3.50 in fines by now. Cough up the goods already.

Regarding the Scientology expose - I've decided that I'm annoyed by the fact that there aren't citations. She's got a huge bibliography in the thing, and a bunch of notes at the end, but there aren't any superscripts to indicate where those notes might correspond to the text. Her footnotes are purely to add asides and clarification, but don't offer any sources, or at least not sources that are cited in an academic fashion. (They'll say something like, "The Church denies this.") It's lazy and it undermines the legitimacy of her research. You would think, when she spent this much time investigating the thing, she'd want it to come across as rigorous and meticulous. Apparently not. So if you, dear reader, decide to write a book that relies heavily on source material, don't be as ass - cite.

1 comment:

  1. How academic of you. I think it's a problem generally with "pop" history/biography/nonfiction. In fact, you could say it's the thing which separates books designed more for an academic audience from those for general public consumption. There are exceptions, of course - but I think most people are neither curious enough to check sources or sophisticated enough to recognize the role of sources (or that they even exist).

    ReplyDelete

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