Special request for Show and Tell Projects 4 and 5: Add sources, and add them as notes. It’s a history course after all, and history uses the Chicago Notes and Bibliography style. This blog post is written to serve as an example of what that looks like.
If you want to know why we (faculty in general) request you to add references, please re-familiarize yourself with the AIC and check out this list of Frequently Asked Questions and info about plagiarism from the Writing Center directors.
In word processors (Word, Google Docs etc) it’s easy to insert footnotes and all the little note marks. In a blog post, we have to mimic this manually. Fortunately, your posts are not that long, and there is an easy solution. You can include sources in the text with a note just like this.(1) [<– use that model, and scroll down to see the note content.] Include the page number in the note at the bottom. In a very short piece with only a couple of notes, you can use just footnotes and not a separate bibliography/list of works consulted.(2) I have given you in this post the benefit of adding the Bibliography at the very end. A bibliography is a list of works consulted, listed alphabetically by the surname of the author or editor, or if no such name, the title of the work. And remember: just keep the note numbers in the main text going up and up, even if you return to the same source.(3) If you use notes, you can often eliminate mentioning the name of authors or books in the main body of text. That creates space in your word limit for more interesting words than book/article titles!
Then use the “Separator” block and choose “Wide Line” to insert the line as you see here. That indicates the end of your main text, and the start of your notes. Tag on the bibliography all the way at the end so a reader can quickly identify what works you used. Oh, and if you want your notes to get all squeeze together like you see here, without the automatic Paragraph separation: in the top-right corner of the editor window, click on the three dots (all the way right from the “publish” button). Click on Code Editor. Find the section with the notes, and insert <br> at the end of each note. Leave everything else as is! Then click on Save Draft, and Exit code editor.
(1) footnote goes here! See for instance Anthony Grafton, The Footnote (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 34.
(2) Chicago Manual of Style. [without a page or section number you’ll have a lot of fun trying to find that reference… Now you know why I’d like page numbers.]
(3) Let’s just pretend here is another footnote to Grafton, The Footnote, p. 18.
Bibliography
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
https://doi-org.muhlenberg.idm.oclc.org/10.7208/cmos17 - Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. London: Faber and Faber, 2003.
