Check your references!

Background

The first-year tutorial is a required course for incoming Grinnell College students. As part of the course, we ask every student to read a booklet entitled Academic Honesty: Scholarly Integrity, Collaboration, and the Ethical Use of Sources. Among other topics, it deals at length with citation practices: how, when, and why to cite the works of other scholars. Once students have read the booklet, we assign them a series of four short exercises, to make sure that they understand the mechanics of citation. Each tutorial instructor may either devise her own exercises or use a set that is provided in the booklet (Grinnell College, Academic Honesty, 26-29).

In each of these exercises, the booklet supplies a passage from a published work and asks the student to write a paragraph containing an apposite use of that passage (a paraphrase of it, a long quotation from it, some snippets -- two- or three-word quotations -- from it, or an oblique reference to it in a context that elaborates the idea of the passage or takes it in a different direction). In each case, the student is supposed to provide both a well-formed in-line citation at the point of reference and a bibliographical entry following the paragraph.

I taught a section of the first-year tutorial last fall and lazily decided to use the booklet's exercises. When I sat down to mark the students' submissions, however, I discovered that the exercises presented some interesting and unexpected difficulties.

Exercise 1: Paraphrase

The passage provided for the exercise on paraphrase is the first paragraph of an essay by Charles Bazerman, Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language. The exercise explains that [t]his essay is one among many collected in Bazerman's book Constructing Experience, published in 1994 by Southern Illinois University Press in Carbondale, IL, and goes on to state that the passage appears on page 104 of that book (Grinnell College, Academic Honesty, 26).

However, this isn't quite enough information to construct a correct MLA-style bibliographical entry for the essay, which would look like this:

Bazerman, Charles. Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language. Constructing Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994. 104-13.

To construct this entry, a student would have to know that the essay she was citing ends on page 113 of Constructing Experience. The booklet does not provide this information, so the student would have to find this out by some other method -- ideally, by examining a copy of the book itself. Unfortunately, it's not in the Grinnell College library, so even a student who recognized the need for the missing datum would probably try other methods of discovering it.

I performed a Google search for "Constructing Experience" Bazerman. This turned up a table of contents at Charles Bazerman's own Web site, which confirmed the date and place of publication, but did not include any page numbers. (Oddly, this table of contents gives an incorrect title for the essay from which the passage as taken, calling it Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Writing. I must admit that the incorrect title does a better job of disguising its redundancy than the one that actually appears in the published book, so I sympathize with Bazerman's desire to amend it.)

Google also provides a link to another table of contents, this one at the Questia Online Library, which reveals that the chapter following Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language begins on page 114 of Constructing Experience, making it likely that Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language ends on page 113. Sometimes book designers leave a blank page between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, but such pages are pretty much always versos -- pages on the left-hand side of the open book -- and so conventionally have even numbers, so that page 113 is very unlikely to be such a page. Moreover, book designers sometimes insert extra pages at the beginning of a major division of the book; but the on-line tables of contents agree that Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language and the chapter that follows it are both in Part II of the book, so no division-breaking leaf would separate them either.

Constructing Experience is available by interlibrary loan, and our library staff borrowed a copy from the University of Iowa on my behalf, so I was eventually able to confirm that Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language ends on page 113.

Exercise 2: Using a block quotation

The Academic Honesty booklet says that the passage it provides for this exercise is taken from page 49 of George P. Landow's book Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1997) (Grinnell College, Academic Honesty, 27). However, the subtitle that the booklet gives here is the subtitle of the first edition of Landow's book, Hypertext, which was published in 1992. The title page of Hypertext 2.0 reveals that, for the second edition, either the author or the book designer preferred the faux-antique subtitle Being a revised, amplified edition of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology.

I'm inclined to suspect the book designer of this lapse of judgement, since the layout of the title page reflects an aesthetic sensibility consistent with the ridiculous wording of the subtitle. On the title page, the designer elected to use a total of seven different font-and-size combinations:

• Hypertext (36-point, oblique)
• 2.0 (36-point, upright)
• Being a revised, amplified edition of (9-point, upright, bold condensed)
• Hypertext: (14-point, upright)
• The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (14-point, italic)
• George P. Landow (27-point, upright)
• The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore + London (9-point, upright, but not bold or condensed)

Moreover, the book designer made a different decision for the front cover of the paperback edition. On that cover, the title and subtitle of the first edition are printed twice, once with the numeral 2.0 inserted at the end of the title. Although some of the same font-and-size combinations are used on the front cover and on the title page, and some of the elements are similarly positioned, they don't match.

Exuberance of this kind is the mark of a designer who really enjoys the work and brings to it a long experience in composing ransom demands.

On the other hand, in the introduction to an essay on John Ruskin in The Victorian Web, Landow says that the design of Hypertext 2.0 was created by Glenn Burris of the Johns Hopkins Press, whereas the back cover of the paperback edition ascribes the cover design to Glen Burris (and gives the name of The Johns Hopkins University Press correctly). The author's sloppiness about these basic facts hints that the wacky subtitle may be his own idea after all. The 2006 edition of the book has yet another subtitle (it's called Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization), which is perhaps an additional piece of evidence for this conclusion.

It's odd that the front cover doesn't match the title page, but the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers is quite clear about what to do in such situations: It directs the citer to [s]tate the full title of the book, including any subtitle, as given on the title page of the book (Gibaldi, MLA Handbook, 150). So the MLA-style bibliographical entry for Hypertext 2.0 should be

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: Being a Revised, Amplified Edition of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

(The typographical treatment of the title-within-a-title is discussed in section 3.6.4, Titles and quotations within titles, of the MLA Handbook [Gibaldi, MLA Handbook, 106-107], which explains that, although it would be permissible to continue the underlining to the end of the subtitle, the MLA prefers, in its own publications, the revert-to-undecorated style that I've used here.)

In its rendition of the passage from Hypertext 2.0, the Academic Honesty booklet introduces two ellipses, one replacing nothing more than a raised footnote number in the original, the other replacing a parenthetical reference to a figure. Oddly, neither ellipsis is in quite the right place:

• The footnote number appears at the end of a sentence, to the right of the final period. Hence, the period at the end of the sentence precedes the ellipsis and should not be separated from the end of the sentence (texts. ... Hypertext corpora). However, in the booklet, there is a space between the last word of the sentence and the following dots (thus: texts . . . . Hypertext corpora).
• The parenthetical reference to a figure is the last text element of a sentence and so appears just before the final period. Hence, the ellipsis that replaces it should appear just before the final period, separated by a space from the word preceding the parenthetical reference, thus: texts .... (with the first three dots constituting the ellipsis and the last one being the period). However, in the booklet, the space before the ellipsis is missing (thus: texts. . . .).

Exercise 3: Using snippets

The passage provided for the snippet exercise is taken from page 66 of Toni Morrison's Beloved (published by Penguin in New York in 1987) (Grinnell College, Academic Honesty, 27). Once again, however, it turns out to be difficult to check the facts of publication. The Grinnell College Library's copy of Beloved is the first edition, a hardback published in 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf and distributed through Random House. It appears that the booklet is referring to a different edition, one that I have not yet been able to identify precisely.

I asked Kathryn Dunn, one of our reference librarians, to help me reconstruct the early publishing history of Beloved. Using WorldCat, she discovered two plausible candidates, one (ISBN 0452261368) published by Plume, the other (ISBN 0451161394) by Signet, an imprint of New American Library. Plume and New American Library were both acquired by Penguin Books in 1986, and indeed Penguin Group, in its history of Plume, says that Plume was the trade paperback imprint of New American Library.

Ms. Dunn placed interlibrary loan requests for the Plume and Signet editions of Beloved. Unfortunately, the Plume edition that we were able to borrow from the West Des Moines Public Library just confuses the matter further. It bears a different ISBN, 0452280621. No date or place of publication appears on the title page, and the phrase A PLUME BOOK appears in lieu of the publisher's name. The copyright page begins, PLUME / Published by the Penguin Group, and goes on to announce that this is the First Plume Printing (movie tie-in), September, 1998, meaning, I judge, not that it is the first printing under the Plume imprint, but rather that it is the first printing that is tied to the 1998 movie (probably a reference to the cover, which shows a scene from the film and includes an ad for it).

The copyright page also includes the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, giving its LC number as PS3563.08749B4 1988b -- that's right, 1988, not 1987 and not 1998 (and a zero after the dot, in place of the letter O that belongs there). The Library of Congress Online Catalog, on the other hand, gives the LC number PS3563.O8749B4 1987d for the edition with ISBN 0452261368, but says that their copy, at least, was printed in 1988.

It seems to me that the edition that the Academic Honesty booklet is most likely to be referring to is the one with ISBN 0452261368. I am therefore tentatively basing my MLA-style bibliographical entry for it on the information from the Library of Congress, thus:

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Plume, 1987.

What should my students should have done in this situation? I think that their best course of action would have been to check the Grinnell College Library's copy of Beloved and write up a bibliography entry based on that. However, there's another problem.

A comparison of the passage as printed in the Academic Honesty booklet with the same passage as printed in the Knopf edition of Beloved reveals that they are not identical. Here is a sentence from the Knopf edition (Morrison, Beloved, 66):

Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers.

In the Academic Honesty booklet, the comma after the fourth occurrence of like him is missing and the word posses is misspelled (Grinnell College, Academic Honesty, 28), thus:

Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, possees and merrymakers.

I was particularly displeased to discover textual variation in this context, since these apparent copying errors undermine the very specific effects that the author is trying to achieve by using unusual words (such as paterollers) and nonstandard forms -- the original passage also contains coloredperson and coloredwoman, each written as a single word).

I can't be absolutely sure whether the errors were introduced during the preparation of the Academic Honesty booklet, or of the edition of Beloved that it quotes from. That edition appears, however, to have the same pagination as the Knopf edition -- at least, the cited passage wound up on a page with the same number -- and I suppose that the body of the novel was probably printed from the same plates or films rather than being reset by a different compositor, so that the errors were probably committed here at Grinnell.

Exercise 4: Using an idea from another source

The Academic Honesty booklet introduces the passage that the students are to work with in this exercise as follows:

In the following passage taken from page 93 of the essay P.C., O.J., and Truth, Susan Bordo discusses the OJ Simpson trial. This essay is included in her collection Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. published by the University of California Press in Berkeley in 1997.

As in exercise 1, an MLA-style bibliographical entry for this essay requires information that is not given in the Academic Honesty booklet: the numbers of the first and last pages of the essay in Twilight Zones. The Grinnell College library has a copy of this book, so it was straightforward to determine that P.C., O.J., and Truth begins on page 66 of Twilight Zones and ends on page 106.

However, the passage actually appears on page 92 of Twilight Zones, not page 93. I regret to say that none of my students discovered this, and I infer that none of them checked the booklet's reference against the actual publication to find out whether it was accurate.

Here's my MLA-style bibliographical entry for Bordo's essay:

Bordo, Susan. P.C., O.J., and Truth. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 66-106.

In the Academic Honesty booklet, the passages that the students are asked to use are not indented, as a block quotation would be in a student's paper. Instead, each passage is set entirely in italics to distinguish it from the surrounding text. This ad hoc convention unfortunately collides with Bordo's use of italics for emphasis. In the original, the passage from P.C., O.J., and Truth begins as follows (Bordo, Twilight Zones, 92):

The legitimate role of defense lawyers is to create reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors, that is, to lead them to the point where after they have sifted through all the evidence, they will have reason to doubt the proof of guilt presented by the prosecution. Nowadays, I would argue, what they try to do instead is to create a world of hyperbolic doubt in which nothing can be trusted because everything is possible, leaving jurors unable to sift and weigh what is reasonable to believe and what is sheer speculation or fantasy.

The version in the Academic Honesty booklet conceals the emphasis by using italics throughout, making it more difficult to understand the idea that Bordo expresses (Grinnell College, Academic Honesty, 28):

The legitimate role of defense lawyers is to create reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors, that is, to lead them to the point where after they have sifted through all the evidence, they will have reason to doubt the proof of guilt presented by the prosecution. Nowadays, I would argue, what they try to do instead is to create a world of hyperbolic doubt in which nothing can be trusted because everything is possible, leaving jurors unable to sift and weigh what is reasonable to believe and what is sheer speculation or fantasy.

Using indentation to set off the passages would have been a better idea to begin with, since it would teach by example, helping students to understand the convention that they are expected to follow when quoting a long passage. Even given the decision to use italics, however, one could preserve the sense of Bordo's passage by applying some distinctive typographical treatment to the words she italicized. The conventional treatment would be to set them in roman type, thus:

The legitimate role of defense lawyers is to create reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors, that is, to lead them to the point where after they have sifted through all the evidence, they will have reason to doubt the proof of guilt presented by the prosecution. Nowadays, I would argue, what they try to do instead is to create a world of hyperbolic doubt in which nothing can be trusted because everything is possible, leaving jurors unable to sift and weigh what is reasonable to believe and what is sheer speculation or fantasy.

Lessons

This set of exercises was unexpectedly instructive. It led me to investigate a number of fine points about the mechanics of citation that I would not otherwise have had occasion to learn (and I invite readers who have additional corrections or insights to send them to me). And I learned that it takes enormous effort to prepare exercises of this type well, or to do them well, or to grade them well.

More importantly, however, this experience led me to question the whole idea of having students assemble bibliography entries from information that we give them. The process of creating suitable exercises of this sort is just too prone to error: Despite the obvious care that went into their construction, every one of the four exercises discussed here provides the student with information about the quoted passage that is either incorrect, misleading, or insufficient.

But the most valuable lesson that I draw from the observations presented here is one that I already knew, in principle, but failed to communicate to my students: Check your references! The tools of modern scholarship, I find, are introducing serious, annoying, and distortive errors into our works at an appalling rate. We must redouble our efforts to prevent them, and to reverse the ones that we don't prevent.

In asking our students to draw up MLA-style bibliographies from information that we give them, even if we ourselves have thoroughly checked that information, we're encouraging them to form an unscholarly habit. Acquiring that habit is likely to lead, in future cases, to the propagation of errors, since most secondary sources aren't so trustworthy! The next time my students do an academic-honesty exercise, I'll require them to collect all the bibliographical information themselves, from primary sources.

Bibliography

In preparing these entries, I have generally followed the guidelines for bibliographies in The Chicago Manual of Style, fifteenth edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Bazerman, Charles. Charles Bazerman | UCSB | Homepage. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006. http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/bazerman/.

Bazerman, Charles. Constructing Experience. University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006. http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/bazerman/Constructing.html.

Bazerman, Charles. Linguistic and Rhetorical Studies of Disciplinary Language. In Constructing Experience, 104-113. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.

Bordo, Susan. P.C., O.J., and Truth. In Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J., 66-106. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003.

Grinnell College. Academic Honesty: Scholarly Integrity, Collaboration, and the Ethical Use of Sources. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell College, 2006. http://www.grinnell.edu/academic/writinglab/writers/academichonesty.pdf.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: Being a revised, amplified edition of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

The Library of Congress. Library of Congress Online Catalogs. The Library of Congress, 2006. http://catalog.loc.gov/.

Landow, George P. Introduction. The Victorian Web, 2006. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/pm/intro.html.

Landow, George P. The Victorian Web: An Overview. The Victorian Web, 2006. http://www.victorianweb.org/.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Online Computer Library Center. FirstSearch Login Screen. WorldCat Services, 2006. http://firstsearch.oclc.org/.

Penguin Group (USA). Penguin Group (USA) | About Us | Plume. 2006. http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/aboutus/adult/plume.html.

Questia Media America. Constructing Experience by Charles Bazerman at Questia Online Library. Questia Online Library, 2006. http://www.questia.com/library/book/constructing-experience-by-charles-bazerman.jsp.

Questia Media America. Questia - The Online Library of Books and Journals. Questia Online Library, 2006. http://www.questia.com/.