One of the people with whom I’ve done a lot of work over the years on supporting inclusion at events, is Alison Baker of the University of East London. Alison teaches Education and has a diagnosis of dyspraxia. This is a piece she wrote about her experiences and needs.
I am sure I am not the first person to write on this topic so please feel free to link me to more considered analysis and also to tell me the purpose of citation methods in your discipline.
I began academic life as a historian. As such I learned to work with and to love Chicago. As an editor and author however I have used MLA, and as a student I have used Harvard. Being a dedicated Chicago person I have sworn long and loud about both MLA and Harvard. This post is not about that.
In recent years I have begun to notice that when citation methods are presented to students, they are always presented in discussions of plagiarism. The choice of citation method is always taken for granted as “this is just what the department requires”. There is relatively little discussion of why the choice of a particular citation method in a discipline. The consequence is that students get very anxious about whether they have cited enough or properly and citation becomes functional rather than part of their research process. Below are my own thoughts on why we do what we do with each method. These thoughts may be wrong, but I’ve found that discussing it this way has helped students to see citation as intrinsic to what they write, rather than defensive.
Chicago/footnotes (or if they force you, endnotes): as a historian I am wedded to footnotes. A Chicago footnote gives all the detail you could possibly want; it lets you cite letters, web sites, personal correspondence all in great detail. A standard footnote in my PhD was two lines long
It would have been longer but that (Box 8) unpacks as General Files 1938 Foreign Service – Spain (Correspondence, Murcia, Esther Farquhar – Finance) in the Bibliography.
What on earth is the point of this? Well as I found last year, at least one person has followed back these detailed footnotes in order to check if I got things right, to recontextualise what I wrote on the basis of the letters either side, and generally to make a very different use of the material than I did.
Chicago enables you to track material to the source and use it for very different purposes. One way to think of it is that Chicago is the thread you follow back in the research labyrinth. Also one asset of Chicago is that it always reminds you when something was produced and can draw your attention even in secondary works to different editions or versions of something.
MLA in text citation and expansive endnotes: MLA citation looks like this (Shakespeare: 2009, 35) the first time it’s used, then (Shakespeare 45). It is usually placed at the end of the sentence, although Debbie Gascoyne offers this configuration if the edition doesn’t matter:
(Hamlet I.ii.75) for act, scene and line – applicable to any printed version of the play but with the full details of the specific edition in the wks cited. Your DWJ book would be (Mendlesohn 43) if that was the only work cited, and if I had more than one work by you it would be (Mendlesohn, DWJ 43). Only (43) if I had mentioned your name in the sentence.
(And that as an author I’ve been asked to use all of these and a few more approaches is one reason why I continue to prefer Chicago).
It can drive historians to distraction. What do you mean Shakespeare 2009? How can you cite him as writing in 2009? But of course that is not what it means and it’s very unfair of historians to complain (although as an editor I’ve seen unfortunate mistakes in which an author has come up with a line of influence that would have required time travel, because they didn’t check dates).
MLA citation is there so that you can check the veracity of what was said: did the author get it right? Have they honoured the context and the meaning of what was said? Which edition of a text are they using if there is an argument over which version of a classic they should use (particularly relevant if there one is working with one of several translations, or a text which the author returned to such as an Agatha Christie novel). MLA is less good for a researcher looking for snippets they can use on an entirely different project but it is good if you are engaged in critical argument and you all want to be (literally) on the same page.
MLA does sometimes use endnotes, but they are mostly not for citations: instead they tend to be used for asides and expansions and sometimes for quips.
Harvard in text citations. These look like this (Mendlesohn 2009). They appear immediately after the summary of an idea. So:
It has been argued that there are four primary modes of genre fantasy (Mendlesohn 2009).
Only if you actually quote do you give a page number: It has been argued that there are four primary modes of genre fantasy, “Portal-quest, Intrusion, Immersive and Liminal (Mendlesohn 2009, p. 5).
To users of MLA or Chicago, the first approach is bizarre. It gets even worse if you offer:
Fantasy has been defined as an exercise in belief (Todorov 1975; Attebery 1982; Clute 1995; Mendlesohn, 2009).
What is this about? How are you supposed to track down these ideas given that these are all books?
The answer is that you are not. These are not citations as MLA and Chicago understand them. Instead they are an exercise in situating your argument. It is a sad fact that you can get away in Harvard with not having actually read any of those authors, but only another author who has described their opinions. But this is acceptable because what you are actually doing is establishing to which school of opinion, or methodology or political stance you subscribe, or which school etc. you think has got it terribly wrong. You are identifying your critical family, and the line of descent of your thinking.
If you are a student, I hope that helps. If you are an academic of any discipline or an editor, please feel free to weigh in.
Citation matters, and the ideology of why we cite helps us to get it right.
I want to finish with a quote:
Citation is a politics of desired and sometimes aspirational affiliation that the one who is being cited cannot control. Tao Leigh Goffe, @taoleighgoffe Twitter, October 3 2020
This made me think again about all of the above. When you cite someone consider it part of a conversation with them. Cite with respect, and cite with the understanding that one of the things you are doing when you cite is rendering the hard work of others more visible.
Farah Mendlesohn
“Approximately 9 million people in the UK have a hearing loss. This is approximately 19% of the total population or 1 in every 7 persons. Hearing loss increases sharply with age. About one third of the population aged between 60-70 years and three quarters of the population aged over seventy years have a hearing loss.” Deafness – UK Statistics and Facts
For some reason, deafness is the neglected disability in the classroom and in conferences. Even though it is probably the commonest disability–and the one that is coming to most of you one day–it is routinely dismissed as a minor problem. Before I begin I want to emphasise that even though my own mother is deaf, and it’s her progressive hearing impairment I have inherited, I was every bit as blasé until it came to me.
NB: if you are Deaf or Hearing impaired and wish me to edit, clarify, add to the following please email me. This is a work in progress.
Edit: My attention has been brought to his fantastic post from Sarah Sparks about using a Cochlear Implant.
Farah,
There are a number of key things to understand before I start.
Recommendations
Thank you for reading this.
Please circulate it, and please, if you have good hearing, be an ally and join in demanding microphones and that people use them.
I see a lot of advice on completing PhDs (the latest was at The Guardian this week) but very little of it ever seems to explain how to actually finish one, in those last, awful throes of “when will I ever be done-ness” that means you can end up spending as much time on the final checks as you did writing several chapters.
Below is a link to a set of slides I take students through to help them finally get over those last hurdles with as little stress as possible. I’d note that I use the advice here for every book I write.
Farah Mendlesohn
Thanks to fabulous response from fans, the Kickstarter for the Diana Wynne Jones conference covered the entire cost.
You can register for the conference/convention here.
We need conventional academic papers but we would be delighted to receive proposals for play readings, workshops, and other creative activities.
I have added a new page on which I will link calls for papers for events for which I am involved.
My current projects include:
and coming very soon a call for the next conference on Diana Wynne Jones, which has just reached it’s target for the deposit over on kickstarter.
It’s bad enough when you order a book and it turns out you can only pre-order it and it will arrive oh, months in the future that doesn’t feel real. But it’s even worse when you know that a book you are really excited about is just a smidgen away from being published and needs just a teeny fund raising boost.
That’s the case with my friend and colleague Adam Robert’s book, a collaboration (beyond the grave) with the author Anthony Burgess, to complete his book The Black Prince.
The book is over at Unbound, the crowdfunding/subscription publisher, and it is currently standing at 81%. It just needs 80 of you to sign up for the signed hardback, which comes with a free e-book, for £25.
Adam Roberts is one of the most interesting writers around. His work is deep, complex, frequently leaves me baffled and always challenged. You won’t regret purchasing this book.
Below I persuaded him to answer a few questions.
What is it about The Black Prince that attracted you to the manuscript?
It was the Anthony Burgess angle rather than the historical fiction angle that first drew me. Which is to say: it’s not that I had any great hankering to write a historical novel as such. But I’ve long been a fan of Burgess’s writing and when I chanced upon an interview he gave to the Paris Review in 1972 in which he said he was 90-pages into “a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward III’s time, using Dos Passos’ devices”; a novel “about the Black Prince” I was intrigued. Writing medieval history via a writer as famously modern and experimental as Dos Passos—it’s a bold and I think brilliant idea. Burgess said: “I thought it might be amusing blatantly to steal the Camera Eye and the Newsreel devices from Dos Passos just to see how they might work, especially with the Black Death and Crécy and the Spanish campaign. The effect might be of the fourteenth century going on in another galaxy where language and literature had somehow got themselves into the twentieth century. The technique might make the historical characters look remote and rather comic—which is what I want.” The thought of (a big chunk of) an unpublished Burgess novel, and the thought that I might complete it, led me to the Burgess Institute and the Estate.
Why you? Why are you the best person to write this? No false modesty please!
A writer probably isn’t the best-placed person to have a clear view of his/her strengths, but still: there are, I think, consonances between the way Burgess wrote and the way I write—in part because reading Burgess as I was growing up influenced the sort of writer I became myself. So for instance: Burgess was an expert writer of pastiche, and could reproduce styles and idiolects brilliantly. That’s something I can do too: indeed, I don’t see ‘pastiche’ as a negative thing. Quite the reverse. So: to prepare for this novel I re-read Dos Passos’s “USA” and the complete run of Burgess’s writing, and then sat down to pastiche, as expertly as I could, Burgess-pasticheing-Dos-Passos. Just the technical challenge of that excited me. As I say I’m not the person best placed to say so, but it seemed to me I manage this. There are some other things: I share Burgess’s fascinating with literary form, and was able to do (to me) interesting things with the structure of the novel: Edward the Black Prince was by all accounts obsessed with the trinity, and the holy spirit, and I worked all sorts of threes, and nines, into the structure. But the main thing is that I really love Burgess, and that meant I could really immerse myself in the Burgess mode. I wanted to produce something of which, were he alive today, he could be proud. Or at least, not ashamed.
Can you elaborate on the links you see between historical and science fiction?
There’s a lot I could say in answer to this, but to be brief: both sorts of writing have to build their worlds, in ways neither obtrusive nor false. Both have to find ways of estranging their characters from the assumptions of their readers—medieval people really weren’t just 21st-century people in funny clothes, just as aliens really need to be more than human beings with pointy-ears or crumpled-foreheads—without pulling them so far out of the contemporary frame that readers lose the ability to empathise with and care about those characters. Writing the novel proved a fascinating business for me, actually. When writing SF it’s usually possible to shuffle the terms of the world, or the parameters of the physics, if they get too constraining of your story. I’m not advocating the completely untrammelled hand-wave as the basis of writing SF, but one of the attractions of writing in a fantastic idiom is that it just offers the writer more imaginative freedom. Writing a proper historical novel was something else. I read pretty widely in the history of the period—Jonathan Sumption’s multivolume history “The Hundred Years War” is very good—and poked and pried, but I found weird little gaps that my reading refused to fill. For instance: there’s a lot of stuff about how knights fought on 14th-century battlefields, and some stuff about how ordinary soldiers fought, ground troops and archers and so on. But let’s say you want to know exactly how the chain of command functioned, in the heat of battle. Are there, let’s say, medieval equivalents to modern NCOs? How, exactly, did sergeants or ensigns (Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol = Ensign Pistol) liaise between the high command and the men? Were orders written on bits of paper and taken by riders to the front, as happened in the 19th-century? We know that trumpets were used to announce advances and so on, but were there whole descants of different musical parpings telling bodies of men to wheel, stand, retreat, fire arrows and so on? There are libraryfuls of books of military history, but lots of this nitty gritty is surprisingly elusive—or at least I found it so—and you need to know it if you’re going to write it from the grunts’-eye view. Some of it falls into the “we honestly don’t know”, because the written records from that time are really only interested in what the posh nobs were doing, on their champing-stamping heroic steeds, and the accounts of battles tend to be inflected by chivalric codes anyway. In a SF text you can simply fill that gap; but writing a historical novel is a much more painstaking business.
To order your copy of The Black Prince by Anthony Burgess and Adam Roberts, go to the project page at Unbound.
When this project started I didn’t have to have a title. The book was part of a series and it would be known simply by the name of author. It was only once I submitted the book that we realised that calling it simply Robert A. Heinlein would not make it terribly searchable in the e-book stores.
One of the comments I’ve frequently made, is that in some ways I have been channelling the great man himself. Verbosity, intemperance, etc etc. But nowhere has this been truer than my inability to come up with a title. Heinlein had a terrible ear for titles. Most of his stories were titled by magazine editors, and most of his adult novels were titled by Virginia. His original title for Number of the Beast, for example, was The Panki-Barsoom Number of the Beast, or even just Panki-Barsoom.
So I did what Heinlein did and outsourced the problem, in this case to many friends on facebook. I assembled 12 titles, submitted them to Unbound, and after some back and forth as our ideas changed we finally settled last week
And the title is…..
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein.
release date: March 2019
Despite what it says all posts here are by me, Farah. I only realised this evening that they are “authored” by EF James. That would be the beloved, the person who spell checks and fact checks my work and also makes sure all the footnotes are formatted properly. This time round he has done so much work on the book that he gets an editorial credit. Fair’s fair.
I’m off to the University of Chichester tomorrow to do a couple of talks, one on Jewish fantasy writing which I first gave in Vienna last year, and which is still very much a work in progress. The other, less formal, is on Heinlein (inevitably). I was asked to send a story in that I wanted to talk about to send in The Green Hills of Earth. I was really touched to find in the next email I received that the story still has the power to move when read for the first time.
The year is ending and I am getting queries as to when the book is coming out. The answer remains “next year” but as that can feel “this year, next year, sometime, never…” I thought I’d give you a State of the Manuscript Report.
When Unbound accepted my book on Heinlein a manuscript existed of over 150,000 words, designed for another publisher who had some series based requirements, and which was also very definitely an academic publisher.
Unbound asked me to cut around 10,000 words, and I decided that as so very many of you are not academics, some of what would go was the academic “architecture” that can make a book feel stodgy. So we’ve made new decisions on how to do the citations, and cut some of the references to other critics which are there to show off that I’ve read everything even it if it wasn’t terribly relevant. We also have to check all the spellings and punctuation and even some of the grammar, because the original publisher was American and Unbound is British.
The editing goes in stages. I spent a week going chapter by chapter making cuts and line edits and generally trying to lose repetition, and where I had repeated things, deciding where the best possible place was to put something. I did all of this on paper. As someone who hates hand writing and barely picks up a pen for more than the shopping list, I still regard this as absolutely necessary. My preference is to print out on the left hand side of A3 paper, leaving the right hand side (the equivalent of an A4 sheet) to make notes. I also like to edit using Sarasa’s blood red gel pens. They stand out without reminding me of school. I end up with a full manuscript covered in hand writing. Then someone has to input it.
The someone—and I swear he is a hero—is my partner, Edward James. There is a thing in traditional academia where academic acknowledgements often reveal sexism and downgrading of wifely labour at startling levels. My favourite is “I would like to thank my wife for conducting and translating the interviews as I did not speak Japanese”. Er, sir? Are you sure that she’s not your research assistant, and how much did you pay her? When this comes up I always feel a bit embarrassed because lurking behind every one of my books is my partner. Some of it is because I’m mildly dyslexic, some is because one always needs a fresh pair of eyes, and some of it is because he is just more careful and pedantic than I am. So right now, as I write this, he is downstairs inputting all my corrections, cutting yet more material and popping upstairs every now and again to clarify issues, make suggestions and ask if I really meant what I wrote on that page. Again, this process will take about a week. He is being rewarded with acknowledgments and the past week’s experiments in gluten free and dairy free muffins (lemon and poppy seed last night, tomorrow cheese and onion souffle muffins).
Between Christmas and New Year the manuscript will land back on my desk again. I’ll go through every query left, make some final choices on possible cuts, and then read it once more to make sure it makes sense and we’ve not made hash of the meaning from the cuts. Then it heads off to Unbound.
Once Unbound have read it, it still has to be laid out, copy edited, proof read and indexed and eventually slotted into a schedule. It’s a long task. Realistically we are looking at autumn of next year. If that seems a long time be reassured that’s actually rather efficient.
So while you all wait, may I wish those of you who celebrate a merry Christmas, and a happy New Year.
Farah Mendlesohn 