This is more of a gripe than anything else

[nadinbrzezinski]

so finally sat down to start writing that history of labor... and here is my gripe, yes a small gripe... I have ALWAYS hated doing bibliographies. Yes, they are painful. Yes they have a specific format... APA, MLA Chicago... but to my shock and surprise Word will actually format them for me. This is less painful, to a point. But lord, I HATE doing those.

Of course writing non fiction is far different than oh... writing shorts or novels. I have not done any academic writing in a few decades. But I promised I'd tackle this... hell I KNOW it's gotta be done, but the whole concept that we have to, to rescue history... oy.

So this is the gripe for the day. I can WRITE a fiction piece fairly fast, but this academic thingy... I am way out of shape.

:-)

So here I am looking at my total output for the day... the outline, took three days... and now an intro and a page or so of Chapter One... all of three pages... double spaced...

This will be a long haul... and I have to find time for my fiction in between the heavy readying and writing.

[Tansy_Gold]

1. Treat the actual writing the same way you would fiction

When my fiction-writing career blew up and I decided to go back to college at age 50, everyone warned me academic writing would be sooooooooooooooo different from popular fiction. I found out it isn't.

You're still telling a story. It may not have quite the same kind of beginning, middle, and end, or exactly the same hero's journey, but if you can think of it more in those terms and less in "this is gonna be as dry and dull and impossible to read as Lukacs," you'll find it's a snap.





Tansy Gold

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. I kow they are different

since I am a trained historian. So I need to get back into that rhythm.

Also I am adding my footnotes as I go, (and learning how to do that with the current version of Word)

:-)

Now there are a few things that didn't exist back in the ancient days of using... index cards... for bibliography notes.

There are some cool programs to do that, and to my shock... Word will do that too.

:hi:

So some of this is... AAARGGGG TOOLS...

[Tansy_Gold]

3. a footnote tip

You may have already figured this out, but for any lurkers who haven't ----

Set your references as auto-corrects in Word.

For example --

The biblio entry might be -- Anderson, Bonnie S. And Zinsser, Judith P. A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present - Volume I. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

The footnote entry would be -- Anderson and Zinsser, pp. 24-26.


And you can turn that into an auto-correct of, say, AZ1, so that every time you type AZ1, you get "Anderson and Zinsser," and all you need to key in is the page numbers.

If you have two books by the same author, you give them different auto-corrects --

Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Anchor/Random House, 2000.

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969.

could become AM1 and AM2, anything else that isn't a "real" word.


Obviously this depends on your footnote and biblio format, but you can see how it works and set it up accordingly.


I do a lot of transcription and I've learned a few time-saving tips, but there are a lot more out there I'm sure I don't know about. Am always glad to share when and what I can!


TG

[sybylla]

4. Wow! Great tip.

I don't do a lot of this anymore but I have to say I've never thought about auto-correct. That is a terrific idea.