References Volume 2

And I'm back... sorry, this whole "working for a living" thing really constrains my "life work" of blogging. Without any further ado: the continuation of my serial work on references.

As a history student, I was trained to surround myself with references. One of my less inspired professors actually told his class that their final papers would be graded partly on their gross number of references. He also had a tendency to literally (and when I say literally, I don't mean figuratively) froth at the mouth while yelling about the "namby-pamby" liberals who voted for Nader and lost the 2000 election for Gore! He was a nice man, but very intense.

"Fine," I thought to myself. A footnote is just a simple way of showing the reader where you learned whatever you are writing and is "required" unless you are stating something that is "common knowledge." When writing a history paper, you can footnote almost every sentence. After all, most of the time, I had very little knowledge of the subject before I began to learn about it, so all I had to do was pay attention to where I learned each piece of information, and I could cite it. I averaged around ten footnotes per page... by far the most in the class... and, surprise, surprise, that was quite enough for me to earn a top grade from my reference obsessed professor.

That Freshman year effort of mine was not quite as good as my old chess tutor who claimed that he wrote a senior thesis which consisted of one sentence of body text and footnotes for the remainder of the paper. Irreverent, yes, but I think there is some inkling of a point behind the smart-assness. My guess is that my tutor was trying to make the point that any thesis paper is really just a single statement with TONS of time spent trying to show your reader how you came to believe in the truth of that statement. I'm pretty sure that my point was just that number of footnotes was a silly game to play, but that I could play it to extremes if need be.

Later, when I was writing my senior thesis, I found myself constantly troubled by footnotes. My problem was that I was writing about an obscure (although it was once as well-known as the OJ affair) murder case from the 1920s. Before I discovered it on Google, I had never heard of the Hall-Mills case and I had lived and studied history in the town where it took place for 4 years! So, clearly, I couldn't assume that ANY of the details of the case were "commonly known." And the twenties? Well, all I really knew was that the market crashed in '29, that Hoover was president then, and that Wilson had started the decade; that prohibition was on and that Marilyn Monroe walked like "Jello on springs!" (although come to think of it, surely that's an anachronistic line... wasn't Jello a product of the '50s?) I want everyone to enjoy reading my writing, so I certainly wasn't going to assume more general knowledge than that.

Once again, I felt like I should really footnote almost everything. But, when writing a hundred and something page paper, there's no way I could possibly do that. Nor would I have wanted to, because even at their most interesting footnotes break up the narrative flow of the paper; the story in the history. But as a result I spent most of my time while writing, feeling like I was making shit up. I don't think I really was, but without a footnote to point to, who's to say I wasn't?