Bibliography
It is important to have good grammar. Everybody knows that. If you have bad grammar, it is one of the surest signs you can give that you are a stupid person. Not an infallible sign, it's true. There are idiot savants of all kinds, waiting in the wings to falsify our claims about what is necessary for true intelligence. But let's say that grammar, having to do with how we express ourselves to the world, is awfully important.
Some people like to take this good principle too far. If a little grammar is good, then the best grammar must be as hidebound as the court of Louis XIV. And nowhere is this more apparent than in bibliographies and citations. If you have written a bibliography, then you know that it is vitally important where the commas go, where the italics go, and where the date of publication goes. It is also important whether the city of publication is followed by the state. If you do any of these things wrong, then you have what is colloquially known as a "wrong bibliography".
It's not hard to see how things got to this state. Scholars, like all people who make enough money to get by, are panicky about status. It's hard to see whether Professor A's article on the mating habits of icky bugs is more prestigious than Professor B's article deconstructing the Bible (patriarchal themes dominate). What is easy to see is that Professor B didn't indent his citations properly. Nobody wants to fall at the last fence like that, and so bibliography, like all other quantifiable things, becomes important.
You might say, why aren't these things important? They're just like grammar after all, a way to tell the world at large how smart you are, or to demonstrate your stupidity by fouling up. Why am I complaining about citations and references?
The difference is that bibliographies and prose are used for very different things. People are always saying that language is just a way to communicate information. They're wrong, but they'd be right if they were talking about citations. Nobody sits down to just read a bibliography, or complains because they're too muddled to make any sense. If somebody sets out to find the publisher of a book, they cannot possibly do better than finding the publisher. There is no way their experience could have been improved. By contrast, there are a million ways to word a sentence, and they all convey subtly different meanings (the ungrammatical sentences being worse than the grammatical ones, by and large).
So what would be lost by throwing out the rules for bibliography? I can word them however I want, just so long as the information is transmitted. If I judge that listing Author, title, date, etc. in bullet-point format is the best way, why shouldn't I? Or if I'd rather communicate the information in sonnet form, that should be my prerogative.
There would be some concern about whether non-standard bibliographies and citations really would get the information across, but that is a burden we take on anyway, whenever we write a sentence. Rules of grammar in English sentences leave a lot up to the discretion of the writer. We're allowed to write "...that that...," even if it's an awkward construction, just because we want to. Indeed, rather than prevent this sort of thing, bibliographical syntax locks us into it. Think
Some people like to take this good principle too far. If a little grammar is good, then the best grammar must be as hidebound as the court of Louis XIV. And nowhere is this more apparent than in bibliographies and citations. If you have written a bibliography, then you know that it is vitally important where the commas go, where the italics go, and where the date of publication goes. It is also important whether the city of publication is followed by the state. If you do any of these things wrong, then you have what is colloquially known as a "wrong bibliography".
It's not hard to see how things got to this state. Scholars, like all people who make enough money to get by, are panicky about status. It's hard to see whether Professor A's article on the mating habits of icky bugs is more prestigious than Professor B's article deconstructing the Bible (patriarchal themes dominate). What is easy to see is that Professor B didn't indent his citations properly. Nobody wants to fall at the last fence like that, and so bibliography, like all other quantifiable things, becomes important.
You might say, why aren't these things important? They're just like grammar after all, a way to tell the world at large how smart you are, or to demonstrate your stupidity by fouling up. Why am I complaining about citations and references?
The difference is that bibliographies and prose are used for very different things. People are always saying that language is just a way to communicate information. They're wrong, but they'd be right if they were talking about citations. Nobody sits down to just read a bibliography, or complains because they're too muddled to make any sense. If somebody sets out to find the publisher of a book, they cannot possibly do better than finding the publisher. There is no way their experience could have been improved. By contrast, there are a million ways to word a sentence, and they all convey subtly different meanings (the ungrammatical sentences being worse than the grammatical ones, by and large).
So what would be lost by throwing out the rules for bibliography? I can word them however I want, just so long as the information is transmitted. If I judge that listing Author, title, date, etc. in bullet-point format is the best way, why shouldn't I? Or if I'd rather communicate the information in sonnet form, that should be my prerogative.
There would be some concern about whether non-standard bibliographies and citations really would get the information across, but that is a burden we take on anyway, whenever we write a sentence. Rules of grammar in English sentences leave a lot up to the discretion of the writer. We're allowed to write "...that that...," even if it's an awkward construction, just because we want to. Indeed, rather than prevent this sort of thing, bibliographical syntax locks us into it. Think
Nacht, Walter. Boring Research I Have Done. Somewhere: Some Press, 2005looks awkward? Too bad. You don't have any choice. Those op cits are going to find their way into your paper whether you like it or not, and all because everybody's too scared to say "no". I doubt I will ever have to write a paper with proper citations again. I put the odds at 2-1. But if I ever do, I'm not going to play their game. I'm going to cite my sources in proper, English sentences. I learned this language, and damned if I'm not going to use it. Who's with me?
posted by apk01004 at 8:33 PM
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