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Col. Rose Mary Sheldon |
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Constructing
Footnotes Your footnotes are one of the most important parts of your term paper. Without them, all the work you do will be considered plagiarized. Foonotes are the reader’s guide to where you got your information and how you constructed your argument. It is the author’s proof of having done a solid, and honest piece of research in which he presents his or her own views based on research done by other scholars. One’s debt to those scholars must be acknowledged, and the footnotes are where this is done. You may use either footnotes or endnotes in this paper, but those are the only two options. Both can easily be accomplished by using the “footnote” command in Microsoft Word. Parenthetical notes are not appropriate for a paper of this length. Notes must contain a reference to the exact paragraph from which you took the information you have used. They may, however, contain references to more than one book, and may contains subsidiary discussions you do not wish to discuss in the body of the paper itself. Remember
the following items: 1) There is no such thing as “too many footnotes.” One scholarly article may have over one hundred footnotes. You may footnote a single sentence, or an entire paragraph. Better safe than sorry. The reader should be able to identify what you are footnoting and find it exactly in the place where you say it is. Faking footnotes suggests intent to deceive and is a first-class academic offense. If you show the footnote to the professor first to be sure you have done it correctly, then not intent to deceive is present. 2) Everything copied verbatim from another source must be in quotation marks and must be footnoted. It is suggested that you not use many quotes in your paper since this will be interpreted as “filler”. The paper should be in your own words; but in cases where a document or an author’s words must be cited exactly, quotations are appropriate. Remember that quotations must be exact. You cannot edit or cut back a quotation unless you indicate this in the text. Please see the professor about the proper way of doing this. 3) Just because you do not quote something exactly does not mean a footnote is not needed. Anytime you take information from a book, follow an author’s argument exactly, or summarize their research you must allude to it in a footnote. Quotation marks are not needed in these cases, but the footnote is absolutely necessary. Proper
Footnote Format: Footnotes differ from entries in a bibliography. First of all, the author’s name is written first name first, and last name last. This is just the opposite in a bibliography. Another difference is that the place and date of publication are in parentheses. This is not true in a bibliography. Footnotes: Book: Author's first name, last name, title of book (underlined), place of publication, publisher, date of publication (all in parentheses), page number of citation. Example: Francis Dvornik, The Origins of Intelligence Services, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974) p. 55. Article: Author's first name, last name, title of article (in quotes), title of journal (underlined) volume number, date, page numbers. Example: Rose Mary Sheldon, "Tradecraft in Ancient Greece", Studies in Intelligence 30,1 (1986), pp. 39-47.
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Last updated on 16 December 2003 by Col. Sheldon "Espionage is practiced occasionally by spies, and all the time by neighbors, relatives, and colleagues" |