And while I'm whining...

[bunnyjadwiga]

The Chicago Manual of Style is just whacked. Any citation style that can reduce me to bouncing up and down squeaking "I just want to know where to put the damn commas!" is definitely argh. (Of course it might be easier to work if I wasn't trying to use the ONLINE version of the Chicago Manual of Style...)

Anything that makes you change ALL THE PUNCTUATION-- every single bit-- in your citations when you change them from bibliographies to footnotes or vice versa makes me ill. Let's not even get into the difficulties of trying to interpret the bits about citing online sources without actual examples of said citations.

The things I do for my art...

Comments

[tattycat.livejournal.com]

Three of us have spent a grand total of 15 hours this week trying to figure out the Chicago manual to teach to *one* history class. We still can't find any info on how to cite diary entries.

We're supporting a recommendation for the school to move to a single citation style (MLA) to be taught in all Freshmen English classes. It's purely out of spite for the CMS. And Turabian. That's also a hot mess.

[strawberrykaren.livejournal.com]

Yay MLA! I am all about the MLA. (It's what I teach for documentation-writing.)

bunnyjadwiga, I really like using A Pocket Style Manual (I've linked to the current edition from my documentation article, but it's also got an online guide at http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/citex.html -- see http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite7.html for their notes on using Chicago to cite sources.)

See if the current editor will accept MLA -- I did, and I preferred it over Chicago.

[tattycat.livejournal.com]

Chicago is insane. We were trying to figure out how one is supposed to cite an article from a database that publishes it's own articles rather than publishes reprinted articles (ABC-Clio, for reference), and along the way discovered that Chicago requires one to provide a stable URL for every article one uses from any sort of database.

This seems rational, until more research reveals that Lexis-Nexis Academic requires a *backend user* to generate a stable URL. LNA's solution is to suggest that students email the school's electronic resources manager (which would be. . . oh wait, we don't have one), request a URL, and then wait for it to arrive.

Like high school students are going to bother to do that. Hell, I wouldn't have done it in *grad school*.

[jillwheezul.livejournal.com]

Some neurons are vaguely firing and I am remembering there is some free program that works like a mini database and spits out the correct citation form for you... This looks like one, but I can see how this is a tricky business! http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/index.php

[amykb.livejournal.com]

The MLA Stylesheet is wonderful, easy to understand, and easy to use. Why on *earth* are you using Chicago?

Why Chicago?

[bunnyjadwiga.livejournal.com]

Because that is what they want for the CA.

Re: Why Chicago?

[amykb.livejournal.com]

Ok, that makes sense. Sucks, but makes sense :)

I am *really* looking forward to this CA.

[marag.livejournal.com]

::sigh:: Chicago drives me insane. I don't even want to talk about the book I just edited with the >100 pages of bibliography. ::winces::

Honestly, though, I've never found a style guide that didn't drive me insane.

[iestynapmwg.livejournal.com]

When i was doing citations, way back when, i used bibtex. It's an extension of TeX specifically for bibliographies, etc. You just load up a text file with the citations and their data, basically creating a database. Then you loaded a "style" for whatever journal or publication you were writing the article for and it automatically generated your bibliography in the correct format. Footnotes (although i didn't have a need for them) could probably work the same way, loading a different style.

Thinking about it, the same could be done (and probably has been) with xml and a sprinkling of the right flavour xslt.

[ren_flora.livejournal.com]

Do you have access to EndNote or Reference Manager software? Those can auto-format and reformat bibliographies in various formats.
Good luck with the commas!