Basically, use the Chicago section (p.169) of your
A Pocket Style Manual by Diana Hacker. It illustrates and
explains everything you need about footnotes and bibliographies.
Nowdays most word processors will automatically put footnotes at the bottoms
of pages, which we prefer. But it is OK to use endnotes instead,
illustrated in Hacker, 192-93.
As you may know, every academic discipline uses a particular system of documentation. For example, the documentary system used in the social sciences is the APA (American Psychological Association); in the biological sciences it is the CBE (Council of Biology Editors), and in the humanities it is either the parenthetical system of the MLA (Modern Language Association) or the footnote system presented by the Chicago Manual of Style, the oldest of all the documentary systems.
Naturally, in this course we would like to give you practice in the system that will be most useful to you in future courses. However, since you will be majoring in a range of disciplines, it is not feasible to teach each system. Therefore, we have decided to use the Chicago style since in the immediate future you will be required to use that system for the major research paper you will be writing in Honors Civilization. (Even within the Chicago system there are varying methods-- including a method of parenthetical documentation--of which we have chosen the one that seems best suited to the purpose of this course.) You will find a brief description of the Chicago documentation system on page 210 of your handbook. If you need more guidance, the book generally regarded as the best reference is Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For more information on citing online sources according to the Chicago system, see Andy Harnack and Eugene Kleppinger, Online! (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). The following is a brief discussion of the features of Chicago style, condensed from the two texts above.
Footnotes
There are two kinds of notes: reference notes, which cite authority for a statement or cross reference a source, and content notes, which contain acknowledgments or make incidental comments that would otherwise interrupt the flow of the paper. Whether you are making a reference or content note, the place in the text where the note is introduced is indicated by a superscript (an Arabic numeral raised slightly above the line). The note number follows all punctuation except a dash and ideally comes at the end of a sentence. Do not follow the superscript with a period.
Footnotes are placed in numerical order at the bottom of the page on which the reference occurs just below a separator, which is a short line of twelve spaces. The first line of each note is indented five spaces and indicated by an Arabic numeral (not a superscript) followed by a period and a space. Notes may be single spaced with a blank space between. On page 211 of your handbook, you will find sample references for books, anthologies, and articles. Some points you might observe are that the author's name is in normal order, that items within the note are followed by commas, and that page numbers are indicated by numerals only, not preceded by p. or pg. Should you have questions about a reference not covered by your text, consult Turabian's manual for more detailed examples or talk to one of us. The following are sample footnote citations for sources you are likely to use.
Book Footnote:
1. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Vintage, 1991). 27.
Anthology Footnote:
2. Plato, Republic, in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992). 63.
Journal Article Footnote:
3. Bernard Williams, "Pagan Justice and Christian Love," Apeiron 26, no. 3-4 (Sept.-Dec. 1993): 196.
There are two basic types of electronic sources: physical entities such as CD-ROMs and online sources such as networks and bulletin boards. See pages 109-122 of Online! or 158-159 of Turabian's manual for recommendations on adapting the Chicago system to electronic sources. (Given the newness of this type of documentation, these two sources differ.) Online! makes the following recommendation for documenting a file available from the World Wide Web:
author's name (if known)
title of document (in quotation marks)
title of complete work (in italics or underlined)
date of publication or last revision (if known)
URL, in angle brackets
date of access in parentheses
Your citation would then look like this (from Online!):
1. Leslie R. Shade, "Gender Issues in Computer Networking," 14 February 1994, <http://liquid2-sun.mit.edu/fells.short.html> (26 November 1997).
After the first full citation of a work, an abbreviated citation is used for all subsequent references. This includes the author's name followed by the page number of the reference and looks like this:
2. Mason, 18.
If you are using more than one text by the same author, an abbreviated title is also given. (In one method of the Chicago system, an abbreviated title is always given, but we will use the simpler method.) When references to the same work follow one another with no intervening references, then ibid. may be used. The reference would look like this:
3. Ibid.
or, if page numbers are different, like this:
4. Ibid., 17.
The last page of your paper will be a list of works you used or consulted in writing your paper or conducting your research. It could be entitled Bibliography, Selected Bibliography, Works Consulted, or Works Cited. Bibliography entries differ from footnotes in that they are arranged alphabetically, with the author's name in reverse order. Hanging indentation replaces the paragraph indentation used in footnotes. Items within a bibliography entry are separated by periods. Specific page numbers are not given for books, but inclusive page numbers are given for articles and selections from an anthology. The sample sources shown above would look like this in a bibliography listing:
Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Plato. Republic. In Classics of Moral and Political Theory,
2nd ed., ed. Michael Morgan.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992. 32-246.
Williams, Bernard. "Pagan Justice and Christian Love." Apeiron 26,
no. 3-4 (Sept-Dec 1993):
195-207.
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