🚀 go-pugleaf

Gregory Brian Pasternack (gpast@uclink.berkeley.edu) wrote:
: ...Without [citations], I am left 
: having to rake through the copious bibliographies looking for needles in 
: the haystack.

That's why writers should provide a bibliographical essay, not just a
bibliography.

: In fact, I'm surprised that people in this thread find that a mere 10-20 
: characters interferes so thoroughly with the continuity of the text.  I 
: guess I've just taken them for granted and learned how to block them out 
: when I'm not interested.

You try to block them out because, as a reader, you neither need nor 
want them.  You seek them when you put on your hat as a researcher.
To slip citations into the text is to force the text to serve two 
masters.  It would make more sense to write one piece for each
audience. 

Good reading is immersion.  The reader recreates the writer's world.
But the reader cannot concentrate on a text littered with citations
and note numbers the way that he can concentrate on the Iliad.  Part 
of his mind is busy directing traffic around all that scaffolding.  It
robs the reader -- and, if the reader writes, the rest of us -- of
the insights that immersion would have yielded.

Citations and note numbers also affect the writer.  Your letters are
a pleasure to read, because in them you try to communicate.  But if
you are like the rest of us, then when you begin to use citations and
notes, you switch to an Official Voice: Dry, distant, lifeless.  That
is because you are now trying to document rather than simply communicate.

: Please, I don't want to allow this citation issue to blow too far out of 
: proportion.

I think it the most important issue in academe.  Scholars and students
are bored.  They are bored because they can't find anything to read.
It doesn't have to be that way.  

I've responded to some of Greg's other points in a post confined to
talk.environment.

Regards,
Leon Taylor, Economics Dept., Tulane U., New Orleans, La.  70118-5698
taylor@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu