Saturday, May 02, 2009

Writer's block

Seriously, brain is utterly blocking on me. I'm loosing the ability to form a simple sentence and all thanks to Turabian. Stupid formatting system - I know what I want to say but I keep getting tripped up with the footnotes and looking up exact details and my word processing program (endnote, not Word - endnote's free and minorly less glitchy) will NOT let me change it's standard formatting so I keep trying to fix it as I go which is NOT working. I need to give it a rest and just write the darn thing with bad formatting and go back and fix it later. I just hate how regimented it is - I totally get the need for some formatting and some way to cite sources so that facts can be checked or used to help others trace the trail of what you're saying but really, does it MATTER if I have my footnotes indented exactly 1.5" or whatever it is? Will you really have trouble reading my paper without that indent? Will my sources be any harder to find, will my research make any less sense if I don't spend a full half our changing every freakin' footnote to fit that arbitrary guideline? Grr. Making it worse, in college I got very friendly with APA style formatting and really liked it. For a bit there I could do perfect formatting without having to pause and look stuff up. And NO footnote citations, all in-text. Much nicer. Much easier. So now it's extra frustrating because not only can I no longer just type and format as I know how, I've got to use this incredibly complex, detailed system that my word processor doesn't like. Grr.

Ok, back to typing.

3 comments:

Becky said...

Ah, I remember those days. Is Word still on your computer at all? Maybe you could use it just for this, since it'll allow for the footnotes and all?

Rose said...

Bet you'll be glad to get back to sewing. Uggh - footnotes! I agree they should just lead us to the source.

Keely said...

Oh I so hear you on this! I'm a dab hand at APA too but I recently had to do an essay with footnotes and some weird in-house style that this particular profeesor likes - sheesh, drove me mad and took sooooo long!