Lucas Says:

Sunday, February 26, 2006

You Know What I Think?

I think that if you've set a goal of making a standardized format in which people can write research papers and journal articles, making them all meet the same standards of readability and utility, across institutions and national boundaries, and it takes a whole book to outline your rules, you've failed. You're a failure. Instead of a useful tool, it has become a boundary.

You had a good initial idea. If everyone writes citations the same way, wouldn't that be cool? Great, let's make that a rule. But you know what's the problem with rules? You shouldn't make one if it needs 13,000 exceptions. That makes the rule a failure. And you? That's right, you're a failure too.



Edit: in all fairness, I've never cracked the book open. It might be a really enjoyable read. Who knows?

I sure don't.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Make a goddamn program!
I've got better things to do with my time (like write a better paper, perhaps?) than look up the proper way to make citations.
Stop wasting time writing a book about how to make citations and make a program that can take the data and format it properly. Hell, just have it have entry fields for each portion of the publication and spit out a properly formatted paper.

If any professor says otherwise, then they're teaching because they don't publish enough.

8:03 PM  

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