Monday, June 5, 2017

I Am Not a Lawyer And...

...  I don't even play one on TV.

Nevertheless, I have long, long been aware that if I am going to include brief quotations from various people at the heads of chapters, I should gracefully and officially note those quotes, lest someone object and sue me.


Lucky for me, Word includes a reference tab. I fiddled with references and footnotes, and finally settled on using endnotes, which would be the least obtrusive, and let me assemble all the notes on a single page following the entire text. See?



You will learn; you will all learn. But not from me.[i]
— John Gardner

This is the opening quote for volume one, The Hostage. It sits all alone on its very own page, after the dedications page and before page one of the actual story. And on the final page of the entire book, is:

[1] Gardner, John. Grendel. Alfred A Knopf, 1971.

Simple, unobtrusive, and I dare say, elegant.




 Then, after more than a few clumsy experiments and with thanks to the internet for hunting the quotes down (especially Goodreads, which often includes the sources of quotes, which most quotation sites don't), I was able to relocate and cite the immediate sources of all 15 quotes except two. For those, I cheated by citing one of the authors' books that the title implied MIGHT be where the quote could be found.


And this whole process, from learning to formatting to fiddling to completion, took only about 3.5 hours including pouring and reheating coffee, and writing this blog entry.

SO glad that I am no longer an academic!

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