Thursday, May 20, 2004
(1:49 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Documentation Styles
I spent much of my evening yesterday revising and reformatting a paper to submit it to a journal (I just mailed it a bit ago -- please direct any prayers, finger-crossings, etc., toward Virginia, which is its next stop). The journal in question used a mutant form of Turabian style, which required all bibliographic references to be laid out in a table format.
One of my biggest regrets about studying theology is being obligated to use Turabian style, ever. The system of referencing texts by date is arbitrary and ridiculous. Since the date used is the publication date for the edition cited in the text, which is often an edited version or a translation for much theological work, the date hardly ever gives the reader any useful information at all. The MLA approach to references to multiple works by the same author seems to me to be far superior, in that the first few words of the title give the reader a much better indication of which book is really at issue here. For instance, if I were writing a study of Hegel, I think a parenthetical reference that said "(Phenomenology 45)" would be clearly preferable to one that said "(1987: 45)." Given the meaninglessness of the dates of publication for most such projects, an alphabetical listing of the authors' works is also preferable to a listing by date.
The Oxford style, with footnotes rather than parenthetical references, has its own charm, but my version of Word can't seem to put the footnotes on the same page as the reference -- even in the best-case scenario of only one brief footnote on a page, whose reference is right at the top.
In conclusion: down with Turabian style! All disciplines in the humanities must submit to the hegemony of MLA!
