Friday, February 27, 2009

no wonder!

i was always so confused at UVic because the style of formatting for footnotes and bibliographies was slightly different than what i was used to.  nothing major, just stuff like commas where i would have put periods and v.v.

this was kind of difficult for me, having memorized Chicago Manual of Style over the years.  I thought everyone used Chicago Manual.

so anyway, as a grad student, i blithely continued on my merry Chicago way, stubbornly refusing to change for anyone.  I was right.

as a T.A. though, i was forced by a prof i didn't like very much to mark the student's style by the manual that was given in the front of the student's coursebooks and on the department website. then he called me up to his office and spent twenty-five minutes of my 15 minute coffee break from work telling me all the things i did wrong in marking things exactly how he had asked for it to be done!  when he started in on how i had corrected footnotes, i pointed out that that was exactly how it was done in the manual he had given us and all the students.  he said "oh, well that's full of mistakes!  why did you use that?"  now you know why i didn't like him very much, even though he was most student's favorite prof.

so anyway, i just decided to read the Thesis Guidelines PDF before i started in on formatting my final copy (its not really there yet, but i have high hopes for these chapters!)  and i finally found out what is wrong with the style my department uses!

It apparently follows the "Turabian Guide"

what the hell is that?!!!!  

according to my trusty elves on the internet, it is based on Chicago Manual, but it allows you to use parenthetical references if you don't want to use footnotes.  ha!  that is soooooo not allowed in our department!    but bonus!  it says you don't have to put newspaper references in your bibliography!  yes!  no ten page biblio for me!  i will stubbornly stick to this and see what happens.  maybe i should switch to parenthetical references and see what my advisor says.  =innocent eyes= "but i am sticking to the style" =blink= =blink=

yes, that's right C, eek out some kind of control over this situation.

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